Edmund Burke

Never were the views and politics of any government pursued with half the regularity, system, and method that a diligent observer must have contemplated with amazement and terror in theirs.

It is to delude ourselves, to consider the state of France, since their Revolution, as a state of anarchy: it is something far worse.

The assurance of a stable peace, grounded on the stability of their system, proceeds on this hypothesis,--that their hostility to other nations has proceeded from their anarchy at home, and from the prevalence of a populace which their…

So I leave them their dead Robespierre, either to gibbet his memory, or to deify him in their Pantheon with their Marat and their Mirabeau.

From villany no good can arise, but in the example of its fate.

Murderers and hogs never look well till they are hanged.

I could better bear the stench of the gibbeted murderer than the society of the bloody felons who yet annoy the world.

I confess I am of a different mind, and am rather inclined, of the two, to think and speak less hardly of a dead ruffian than to associate with the living.

But it seems we are always to be of a party with the last and victorious assassins.

The murderers of Robespierre, besides what they are entitled to by being engaged in the same tontine of infamy, are his representatives, have inherited all his murderous qualities, in addition to their own private stock.

I have heard that a Tartar believes, when he has killed a man, that all his estimable qualities pass with his clothes and arms to the murderer; but I have never heard that it was the opinion of any savage Scythian, that, if he kills a…

But this last act of infidelity and murder is to expiate all the rest, and to qualify them for the amity of an humane and virtuous sovereign and civilized people.

They have always had the knife at each other's throats, after they had almost blunted it at the throats of every honest man.

He was a tyrant; they were his satellites and his hangmen.

But who gave Robespierre the power of being a tyrant? and who were the instruments of his tyranny?

I rejoiced at his punishment neither more nor less than I should at the execution of the present Directory, or any of its members.

It is the old bon-ton of robbers, who cast their common crimes on the wickedness of their departed associates.

It is from their lapses and deviations from their principle that alone we have anything to hope.

Avowedly and systematically, they have given the upperhand to all the vicious and degenerate part of human nature.

As a basis for such a connection as has subsisted between the powers of Europe, we had nothing to fear, but from the lapses and frailties of men,--and that was enough; but this new pretended republic has given us more to apprehend from…

What signifies the cutting and shuffling of cards, while the pack still remains the same?

Very different is my opinion: I consider the moral basis as everything,--the formal arrangements, further than as they promote the moral principles of government, and the keeping desperately wicked persons as the subjects of laws and not…

They are always considering the formal distributions of power in a constitution: the moral basis they consider as nothing.

The French Revolution did not cause it: it only discovered it, increased it, and gave fresh vigor to its operations.

What seemed to us to be the best system of liberty that a nation ever enjoyed to them seems the yoke of an intolerable slavery.