Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity.
Edmund Burke: “Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its…”
Editor's note · Context
From his critique of the French Revolution, this passage describes the revolutionary dismissal of traditional moral and legal categories.
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But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience.
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.
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…
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.





