Edmund Burke: “These are not days in which monarchs value themselves upon the title of great: they are grown philosophic: they are…”

This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction.

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.

Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.

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.