Edmund Burke

A liberty made up of penalties! a liberty made up of incapacities! a liberty made up of exclusion and proscription, continued for ages, of four fifths, perhaps, of the inhabitants of all ranks and fortunes In what does such liberty differ…

As to a spirit of liberty, still less can it exist, or anything like it.

There may be a party spirit, but public spirit there can be none.

But speaking of things in their ordinary course, in a country of monopoly there can be no patriotism.

You may open the way with pain and under reproach: others will pursue it with ease and with applause.

We know that the Power which has settled that order, and subjected you to it by placing you in the situation you are in, is able to bring you out of it with credit and with safety.

You are engaged in the relief of an oppressed people.

We were then, and at bottom ever since, of the same opinion on the justice and policy of the whole and of every part of the penal system.

It is right always to have a few of every description, through whom you may quietly operate on the many, both for the interests of the description, and for the general interest.

But let us not say to Catholics, by way of argument, that they are to be kept in a degraded state, because some of them are no better than many of us Protestants.

Conspiracies and treasons are privileged pleasures, not to be profaned by the impure and unhallowed touch of Papists.

Unquestionably, we should be perfectly satisfied, when we were told that Houses of Parliament, instead of being places of refuge for popular liberty, were citadels for keeping us in order as a conquered people.

Let us put ourselves in the place of these people, and try an experiment of the effects of such a procedure on our own minds.

But it passes my comprehension, in what manner it is that men can be reconciled to the practical merits of a constitution, the theory of which is in litigation, by being practically excluded from any of its advantages.

I like Parliamentary reforms as little as any man who has boroughs to sell for money, or for peerages in Ireland.

If you treat men as robbers, why, robbers, sooner or later, they will become.

Here many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the Jacobins all the assistance their hearts can wish.

Next to religion, property is the great point of Jacobin attack.

You have no security for anything, but that they will become what are called Franco-Jacobins, and reject the whole together.

Perhaps you may succeed in the same manner with all the other tenets of doctrine and usages of discipline amongst the Catholics; but what security have you, that, in the temper and on the principles on which they have made this change…

But in the present state of men's minds and affairs, do not flatter yourselves that they will piously look to the head of our Church in the place of that Pope whom you make them forswear, and out of all reverence to whom you bully and rail…

The worst of the matter is this: you are partly leading, partly driving into Jacobinism that description of your people whose religious principles, church polity, and habitual discipline might make them an invincible dike against that…

God forbid, that, on a worthy occasion, authority should want the means of force, or the disposition to use it!

They ought to be the ultima, not the prima, not the tota ratio of a wise government.

The complaint or its cause ought to be removed, and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigor.