Edmund Burke

The prattling about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment of a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder.

There are some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule, and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it.

This was reserved to our time, to quench the little glimmerings of reason which might break in upon the solid darkness of this enlightened age.

It was not made to entice the smell of a mole, nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth, as yours is.

They cannot raise supplies; but they can raise mobs.

In all this procedure I can discern neither the solid sense of plain dealing nor the subtle dexterity of ingenious fraud.

Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity, must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the high-road to riches.

Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.

This is the result of all the delusions held out to engage a miserable people in rebellion, murder, and sacrilege, and to make them prompt and zealous instruments in the ruin of their country!

They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.

But when the Assembly were led, through a contempt of moral, to a defiance of economical principles, it might at least have been expected that nothing would be omitted on their part to lessen this difficulty, to prevent any aggravation of…

To establish a current circulating credit upon any land-bank, under any circumstances whatsoever, has hitherto proved difficult at the very least.

Who but the most desperate adventurers in philosophy and finance could at all have thought of destroying the settled revenue of the state, the sole security for the public credit, in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of…

They have not more notes in their song than the cuckoo; though, far from the softness of that harbinger of summer and plenty, their voice is as harsh and as ominous as that of the raven.

The only difference among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance.

These gentlemen perhaps do not believe a great deal in the miracles of piety; but it cannot be questioned that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege.

With these philosophic financiers, this universal medicine made of Church mummy is to cure all the evils of the state.

Their fanatical confidence in the omnipotence of Church plunder has induced these philosophers to overlook all care of the public estate, just as the dream of the philosopher's stone induces dupes, under the more plausible delusion of the…

In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it,--instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation,--that it is…

The whole, indeed, of their scheme of revenue is to make, by any artifice, an appearance of a full reservoir for the hour, whilst at the same time they cut off the springs and living fountains of perennial supply.

The resources of public folly are soon exhausted.

It seemed as if those who adopted such projects were wholly ignorant of their circumstances, or wholly unequal to their necessities.

The invention of those juvenile pretenders to liberty was in reality nothing more than a servile imitation of one of the poorest resources of doting despotism.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

The parts of the kingdom which were the most submissive, the most orderly, or the most affectionate to the commonwealth, bore the whole burden of the state.