Edmund Burke: “But, before this time, our liberty has never been corrupted.”

An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease.

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

Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…