Political Quotes

Edmund Burke: You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born, servile wretches…

On the record
You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born, servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.
Said by
Edmund Burke

Editor's note · Context

Burke criticizes the perception of the French people as insignificant until their revolution, urging a recognition of their historical significance.

Share

More from Edmund Burke

Jan 1, 1790

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…

gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1790

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.

gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1790

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…

gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1790

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…

gutenberg.org

Other voices in this conversation