But the many are not capable of making this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.
Editor's note · Context
In his critique of revolutionary impulses, Burke observes that the masses often fail to grasp the true economic outcomes of redistribution, while their leaders have ulterior motives.
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Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?
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?
An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease.
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.





