Edmund Burke: “We feel as men do, who, having placed an unbounded reliance on their force, have found it totally to fail on trial.”

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…

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.

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?

But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.