It is a crime to bear it, when it can be rationally shaken off.
Edmund Burke: “It is a crime to bear it, when it can be rationally shaken off.”
Editor's note · Context
Burke states that it is a moral failing to accept oppression when one has the ability to resist it.
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When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
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.
Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
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.





