Edmund Burke: “But when I call this woman a dancing-girl, I state something lower than Europeans have an idea of respecting that…”

If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus?

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.

Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.

But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.