Edmund Burke

You confess that you have been wrong, and yet you would pretend to dictate by your sole authority; whereas you disengage the mind by embarrassing it.

But if they once take a religion on the word of the state, they cannot in common sense do so a second time, unless they have some concurrent reason for it.

The people often actually do (and perhaps they cannot in general do better) take their religion, not on the coercive, which is impossible, but on the influencing authority of their governors, as wise and informed men.

If they attempt to proceed further, they disown the foundation upon which their own establishment was built, and they claim a religious assent upon mere human authority, which has been just now shown to be absurd and preposterous, and…

As no water can rise higher than its spring, no establishment can have more authority than it derives from its principle; and the power of the government can with no appearance of reason go further coercively than to bind and hold down…

Religion, therefore, is not believed because the laws have established it, but it is established because the leading part of the community have previously believed it to be true.

Religion, to have any force on men's understandings, indeed to exist at all, must be supposed paramount to laws, and independent for its substance upon any human institution,--else it would be the absurdest thing in the world, an…

The opinion may be erroneous, but the principle is undoubtedly right; and you punish them for acting upon a principle which of all others is perhaps the most necessary for preserving society, an implicit admiration and adherence to the…

If not the right, the presumption, at least, is ever on the side of possession.

If the people are in an error, to inform them is not only fair, but charitable; to drive them is a strain of the most manifest injustice.

But it is quite otherwise with the attempt to eradicate by violence a wide-spreading and established religious opinion.

But they are specious, and sufficiently so to delude a man of sense and of integrity.

The truth is, these politics are rotten and hollow at bottom, as all that are founded upon any however minute a degree of positive injustice must ever be.

Experience has shown, that, if it has been favorable to the cause of truth, it has not been always conducive to the peace of society.

In proportion as mankind has become enlightened, the idea of religious persecution, under any circumstances, has been almost universally exploded by all good and thinking men.

If, then, you require a renunciation of his conscience, as a preliminary to his admission to the rights of society, you annex, morally speaking, an impossible condition to it.

In the former case, therefore, as your law would be unnecessary, in the latter it would be persecuting: that is, it would put your penalty and his ideas of duty in the opposite scales; which is, or I know not what is, the precise idea of…

For, besides that it totally annihilates every characteristic and therefore every faulty idea of persecution, just as the former does, it supposes, what is false in fact, that it is in a man's moral power to change his religion whenever…

Now as to the other point, that the objects of these laws suffer voluntarily: this seems to me to be an insult rather than an argument.

If no other country furnished examples of this risk, yet our laws and our country are enough fully to demonstrate the fact: Ireland, after almost a century of persecution, is at this hour full of penalties and full of Papists.

For the Protestant religion, nor (I speak it with reverence, I am sure) the truth of our common Christianity, is not so clear as this proposition,--that all men, at least the majority of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common…

Everybody is satisfied that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society, and that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they are subservient to that…

Let me add, that the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to…

First, then, I observe, that, if the principle of their final and beneficial intention be admitted as a just ground for such proceedings, there never was, in the blamable sense of the word, nor ever can be, such a thing as a religious…

I shall be very short, without being, I think, the less satisfactory, in my answer to these topics, because they never can be urged from a conviction of their validity, and are, indeed, only the usual and impotent struggles of those who…