Edmund Burke

Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.

But you, who began with refusing to submit to the most moderate restraints, have ended by establishing an unheard-of despotism.

We entertain a high opinion of the legislative authority; but we have never dreamt that Parliaments had any right whatever to violate property, to overrule prescription, or to force a currency of their own fiction in the place of that…

Flushed with the insolence of their first inglorious victories, and pressed by the distresses caused by their lust of unhallowed lucre, disappointed, but not discouraged, they have at length ventured completely to subvert all property of…

I see the confiscators begin with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but I do not see them end there.

If prescription be once shaken, no species of property is secure, when it once becomes an object large enough to tempt the cupidity of indigent power.

With the National Assembly of France possession is nothing, law and usage are nothing.

I see, in a country very near us, a course of policy pursued, which sets justice, the common concern of mankind, at defiance.

But it is in the principle of injustice that the danger lies, and not in the description of persons on whom it is first exercised.

They begin more and more plainly to discern that we have all a common cause, as against a common enemy.

They would reverently and affectionately protect all religions, because they love and venerate the great principle upon which they all agree, and the great object to which they are all directed.

They tolerate, not because they despise opinions, but because they respect justice.

The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity.

Impious men do not recommend themselves to their communion by iniquity and cruelty towards any description of their fellow-creatures.

They do not forget that justice and mercy are substantial parts of religion.

This, in the present condition of the world, would be the last corruption of the Church, the utter ruin of the clerical character, the most dangerous shock that the state ever received through a misunderstood arrangement of religion.

They who will not believe that the philosophical fanatics who guide in these matters have long entertained such a design are utterly ignorant of their character and proceedings.

It has made a degrading pensionary establishment, to which no man of liberal ideas or liberal condition will destine his children.

It has punished all prelates: which is to favor the vicious, at least in point of reputation.

But the present ruling power has shown a disposition only to plunder the Church.

The time is fitted for the duty; and it is particularly becoming to show our justice and gratitude, when those who have deserved well of us and of mankind are laboring under popular obloquy and the persecutions of oppressive power.

No one shall prevent me from being just and grateful.

They seemed to me, beyond the clerical character, liberal and open, with the hearts of gentlemen and men of honor, neither insolent nor servile in their manners and conduct.

They were more fully educated than the military noblesse,--so as by no means to disgrace their profession by ignorance, or by want of fitness for the exercise of their authority.

Undoubtedly, the natural progress of the passions, from frailty to vice, ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and a firm hand.