Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end,--until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites.
In his critique of revolutionary justifications, Burke warns that using perfidy and murder for public benefit will inevitably lead to those acts becoming the true objectives.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Their objects would be enlarged with their elevation; but their disposition, and habits, and mode of accomplishing their designs must remain the same.
As he is not to obey us, but we are to obey the law in him, our Constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible.
So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution to elect our kings, that, if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their…
Other voices in this conversation
