Edmund Burke

Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance.

Embracing in their arms the carcasses of base criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime.

As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards of his person that were massacred in cold blood about him; as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his…

Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by…

Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to…

All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own…

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal,--and an animal not of the highest order.

On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons,--so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.

But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support.

With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one.

They conceive, very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexpiable war with all establishments.

They always speak as if they were of opinion that there is a singular species of compact between them and their magistrates, which binds the magistrate, but which has nothing reciprocal in it, but that the majesty of the people has a right…

Their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it agrees with some of their fleeting projects: it begins and ends with that scheme of polity which falls in with their momentary opinion.

France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long or not run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation.

As things now stand, with everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to apologize for harboring the common feelings of men.

People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.

There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny.

Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity than to make a choice.

A worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant could not possibly be made.

We are generous enemies; we are faithful allies.

If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on Atheism to explain them.