People soon forget the meaning, but the impression and the passion remain.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
This much, my dear son, I have to say of this Protestant persecution,--that is, a persecution of religion itself.
I had rather be thought insane in my charity than rational in my malice.
I speak here of their pretexts, and not of the true spirit of the transaction, in which religious bigotry, I apprehend, has little share.
If the man gets rid of a religion through which their malice operates, he gets rid of all their penalties and incapacities at once.
There is no system of folly, or impiety, or blasphemy, or atheism, into which they may not throw themselves, and which they may not profess openly, and as a system, consistently with the enjoyment of all the privileges of a free citizen in…
But in this Protestant persecution there is anything but benevolence at work.
Man and his conscience cannot always be at war.
None but the most cruel and hardhearted of men, who had banished all natural tenderness from their minds, such as those beings of iron, the atheists, could bring themselves to any persecution like this.
When men are driven from any of those principles on which they have received religion, without embracing with the same assurance and cordiality some other system, a dreadful void is left in their minds, and a terrible shook is given to…
They know, that, to enjoy this consolation, men must believe their religion upon some principle or other, whether of education, habit, theory, or authority.
By making men miserable in this life, they counteract one of the great ends of charity, which is, in as much as in us lies, to make men happy in every period of their existence, and most in what most depends upon us.
It is not permitted to us to sacrifice the temporal good of any body of men to our own ideas of the truth and falsehood of any religious opinions.
The bottom of this theory of persecution is false.
If Protestant ascendency means the proscription from citizenship of by far the major part of the people of any country, then Protestant ascendency is a bad thing, and it ought to have no existence.
I cannot conceive what mode of oppression in civil life, or what mode of religious persecution, may not come within the methods of preserving an ascendency.
This system, in its real nature, and under its proper appellations, is odious and unnatural, especially when a constitution is admitted which not only, as all constitutions do profess, has a regard to the good of the multitude, but in its…
The whole relation of government and of freedom will be a battle or a traffic.
It compels that power which ought, and often would be disposed, equally to protect the subjects, to fail in its trust, to counteract its purposes, and to become no better than the instrument of the wrongs of a faction.
A constitution formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very government, and to overpower the people too, answers the purposes neither of government nor of freedom.
It is the portion of the mass of the citizens, and not the haughty license of some potent individual or some predominant faction.
It is a great and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice.
Liberty, such as deserves the name, is an honest, equitable, diffusive, and impartial principle.
Why, this is the very description of despotism.
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