The miserable natives of Ireland, who ninety-nine in an hundred are tormented with quite other cares, and are bowed down to labor for the bread of the hour, are not, as gentlemen pretend, plodding with antiquaries for titles of centuries ago to the estates of the great lords and squires for whom they labor.
Burke highlights the struggles of the Irish people, emphasizing their immediate concerns over historical land claims.
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An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease.
Who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.
Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.
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