Edmund Burke: “My excuse must rest in mine and your conviction of the absolute, urgent necessity there is that something of the kind…”

Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.

But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators.

All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for…

If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.