Political Quotes

Edmund Burke: The people were first gained, and through them their distracted representatives.

On the record
The people were first gained, and through them their distracted representatives.
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Edmund Burke

Editor's note · Context

Burke notes the importance of gaining the people's support to influence their representatives effectively.

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Jan 1, 1790

Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…

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So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution to elect our kings, that, if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their…

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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.

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But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British Constitution.

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