Edmund Burke: “Taking in the whole view of life, it is more safe to live under the jurisdiction of severe, but steady reason, than…”

If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular.

They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.

The prattling about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment of a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder.

They will become flatterers instead of legislators,--the instruments, not the guides of the people.