We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history.
Edmund Burke: “We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history.”
Editor's note · Context
From his critique of the French Revolution, Burke observes a common failure in learning from the past.
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The House of Lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons,--no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom.
Their trust for the future preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolutions.
They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our…
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.





