Edmund Burke

Hastings has played with the most sacred objects that man ever had a dealing with: with the government, with the justice, with the order, with the dignity, with the nobility of a great country: he played with them to satisfy his own wicked…

He had so great an aversion to the least subtraction of the Nabob's right, that, though expressly commanded by the Court of Directors, he would not suffer Mahomed Reza Khân to be invested with his office under the Company's authority.

My Lords, human greatness is an unstable thing.

But, however, we now see him exalted to be an independent sovereign; he defies the Company at the head of their armies and their treasury; that name that makes all India shake was defied by one of its pensioners.

Will any man tell me that this resistance, under such base, though plausible pretences, could spring from any other cause than a resolution of persisting systematically in his course of corruption and bribery through Munny Begum?

Hastings's motives were in acting against the sense of the East India Company, appointed by an act of Parliament to control him,--that he did it for a corrupt purpose, that all his pretences were false and fraudulent, and that he had his…

It was a wicked silence, the concealment of their common guilt.

Everything in the course of justice was confounded; all official responsibility destroyed; and nothing but a scene of forgery, peculation, and knavery of every kind and description prevailed through the country, and totally disturbed all…

Hastings would incur all the odium attending such transactions, unless he had some corrupt consideration.

It would be an affront to your Lordships' judgment to attempt to prove who was to govern, after he had desired to put the whole government of affairs into the hands of Munny Begum.

Why, lest this old woman (who is not his mother, and with whom he had no other tie of blood) should not be made mistress of himself and the whole country!

Astonishing it certainly was, that a woman who had been a deluder in youth should be suspected to be the same in old age, and that he, a young man, should be subject to her artifices.

The Nabob is astonished at the suspicion, that such a woman as Munny Begum, whose trade in youth had been delusion, should be capable of deluding anybody.

I think this correspondence, wherein a son is made to petition, in his own name, for the elevation of a dancing-girl, his step-mother, above himself and everybody else, will appear to your Lordships such a curiosity as, I believe, is not…

They were odious to many of the India House here; they were odious to that corrupt influence which had begun and was going on to ruin India; but in the face of all this odium, they gave the appointment to Mahomed Reza Khân, because the act…

Hastings would have left her quiet in tranquil obscurity, and that he would no longer have attempted to elevate her into a situation which furnished against himself so much disgrace and obloquy to himself, and concerning which he stood…

Nothing will be secured from the Company's servants, so long as they can find, under this name, or under pretence of any corrupt custom of the country, a vicious excuse for this corrupt practice.

His is the entertainment of Tantalus; it is an entertainment from which the sun hid his light.

We upon our feasts light up this whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all the world to partake them.

Such candles should not be hid under a bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light up when they mean to express great joy and great magnificence for a great event, their very splendor is a part of their excellence.

Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard of that derives from its retirement any part of its lustre; the others require to be spread abroad in the face of day.

Therefore he had but one reason to keep this so dark and profound a secret, till it was dragged into day in spite of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret, but his knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the light.

Hospitality, generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them; they want to be shown to the world, not concealed.

It then becomes a matter of the most serious and dreadful extortion, tending to hinder the people who give it not only from giving entertainment, but from having bread to eat themselves.

But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is more honored in the breach than in the observance, that custom is capable of being abused to the grossest extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your Lordships' minds in such a…