Edmund Burke

The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalize.

If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right.

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.

They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful.

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.

That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.

Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it,--and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their…

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.

Everything ought to be open,--but not indifferently to every man.

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.

If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not represent its ability, as well as its property.

But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the representation.

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 can as little recommend to any other nation a conduct grounded on such principles and productive of such effects.

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.

It is certainly not prudent to discredit the authority of an example we mean to follow.

The public interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance: I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial.