You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew.
Edmund Burke: “You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil…”
Editor's note · Context
Criticizing the French Revolution, Burke argues that the revolutionaries disregarded their historical institutions and acted as if starting society from scratch.
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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…
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