On the record
The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.
Said by
Edmund Burke
Source
gutenberg.orgEdmund Burke: “The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke questions whether it is in the interest of leaders to make their people miserable rather than happy.
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No experience has taught us that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right.
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They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…
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Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?
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But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience.
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