A theatrical, bombastic, windy phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners.
Burke critiques the language and behavior of a society that combines grandiose rhetoric with moral decay.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided, not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy.
This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.
Other voices in this conversation
