Here it is not, how long the people are bound to tolerate the illegality of our judgments, but whether we have a right to substitute our occasional opinion in the place of law, so as to deprive the citizen of his franchise....
Edmund Burke: “Here it is not, how long the people are bound to tolerate the illegality of our judgments, but whether we have a right…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke emphasizes the importance of law over personal opinion in governance.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
Who but the most desperate adventurers in philosophy and finance could at all have thought of destroying the settled revenue of the state, the sole security for the public credit, in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of…
The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds.
Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.
They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.





