Edmund Burke: “The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is the grand cause of…”

Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?

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.

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.

Who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…