Edmund Burke

Because, among all their massacres, they had not slain the mind in their country.

A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation, was not extinguished.

It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule.

Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation.

Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together.

That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course.

If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation.

But the many are not capable of making this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.

I was, indeed, aware that a jealous, ever-waking vigilance, to guard the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom and our first duty.

However, I considered that treasure rather as a possession to be secured than as a prize to be contended for.

When the National Assembly has completed its work, it will have accomplished its ruin.

In this they will see none of the equality, under the pretence of which they have been tempted to throw off their allegiance to their sovereign, as well as the ancient constitution of their country.

All this policy in the end will appear as feeble as it is now violent.

But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep the earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us!

Indeed, their principle, if you observe it with any attention, goes much further than to an alteration in the election of the House of Commons; for, if popular representation, or choice, is necessary to the legitimacy of all government…

Something they must destroy, or they seem to themselves to exist for no purpose.

Whilst they are possessed by these notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a Constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long…

They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought under ground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of Parliament.

They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life and to consolation in death.

Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor.

The robbery of your Church has proved a security to the possessions of ours.