Edmund Burke

With the gentlemen of this minority, there is no ally, from one end of Europe to the other, with whom we ought not to be ashamed to act.

This would be a never failing source of true glory, if springing from just and right; but it is truly dreadful, if it be an arm of Styx, which springs out of the profoundest depths of a poisoned soil.

As to the other party, the minority of to-day, possibly the majority of to-morrow, small in number, but full of talents and every species of energy, which, upon the avowed ground of being more acceptable to France, is a candidate for the…

This defect, to my power, I mean to supply,--that, if any persons should still continue to think an attempt at foresight is any part of the duty of a statesman, I may contribute my trifle to the materials of his speculation.

It always speaks of peace with the Regicides as a great and an undoubted blessing, and such a blessing as, if obtained, promises, as much as any human disposition of things can promise, security and permanence.

It is no longer an object of terror, the aggrandizement of a new power which teaches as a professor that philanthropy in the chair, whilst it propagates by arms and establishes by conquest the comprehensive system of universal fraternity.

All the little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, and boundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France.

This total change of tone on both sides of your House forms itself no inconsiderable revolution; and I am afraid it prognosticates others of still greater importance.

The patience of fortitude and the endurance of pusillanimity are things very different, as in their principle, so in their effects.

Virtues have their place; and out of their place they hardly deserve the name,--they pass into the neighboring vice.

I think we might have found, before the rude hand of insolent office was on our shoulder, and the staff of usurped authority brandished over our heads, that contempt of the suppliant is not the best forwarder of a suit,--that national…

This business was not ended because our dignity was wounded, or because our patience was worn out with contumely and scorn.

But reason of state and common sense are two things.

We state our experience, and then we come to the manly resolution of acting in contradiction to it.

But truth has its rights, and it will assert them.

A minute display of hopes formed without foundation and of labors pursued without fruit is a thing not very flattering to self-estimation.

But the matter is serious; and if ever the fate of the world could be truly said to depend on a particular measure, it is upon this peace.

How should such a thing be found there, when everything has been chosen with care and selection to forward all those ambitious designs and dispositions, not to control them?

No single new corrective is to be found in the whole body of the new institutions.

All the former correctives, whether of virtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone.

But whether in adopting this measure we are madly active or weakly passive or pusillanimously panic-struck, the effects will be the same.

There was no longer any means of arresting a principle in its course.

But the spirit of ambition, now for the first time connected with the spirit of speculation, was not to be restrained at will.

The press, in reality, has made every government, in its spirit, almost democratic.

The correspondence of the moneyed and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of academies, but above all, the press, of which they had in a manner entire possession, made a kind of electric communication everywhere.