But still we must have laws to secure property, and still we must have ranks and distinctions and magistracy in the state, notwithstanding their manifest tendency to encourage avarice and ambition.
Edmund Burke: “But still we must have laws to secure property, and still we must have ranks and distinctions and magistracy in the…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke emphasizes the necessity of laws and social structures to maintain order and property, despite their potential to foster greed.
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It was not made to entice the smell of a mole, nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth, as yours is.
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.
Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity, must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the high-road to riches.
There are some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule, and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it.





