Edmund Burke

It is no excuse at all for a minister who at our desire takes a measure contrary to our safety, that it is our own act.

To have no other measure in judging of those great objects than our momentary opinions and desires is to throw us back upon that very democracy which, in this part, our Constitution was formed to avoid.

The trust was placed there as a sacred deposit, to secure us against popular rashness in plunging into wars, and against the effects of popular dismay, disgust, or lassitude, in getting out of them as imprudently as we might first engage…

It is without reason we praise the wisdom of our Constitution in putting under the discretion of the crown the awful trust of war and peace, if the ministers of the crown virtually return it again into our hands.

Before our opinions are quoted against ourselves, it is proper, that, from our serious deliberation, they may be worth quoting.

Long before their acts of aggression and their declaration of war, the faction in France had assumed a form, had adopted a body of principles and maxims, and had regularly and systematically acted on them, by which she virtually had put…

But though I have taken all these to my aid, I consider them as nothing more than as a sort of evidence to indicate the treasonable mind within.

As a good ground of war I consider his declaration of war on his Majesty and his kingdom.

I think his manifest attempt to overturn the balance of Europe a good ground of war.

I thought the insolent, unprovoked aggression of the Regicide upon our ally of Holland a good ground of war.

We judged of the danger with which we were menaced by Jacobin France from the whole tenor of her conduct, not from one or two doubtful or detached acts or expressions.

When we voted, as you and I did, with many more whom you and I respect and love, to resist this enemy, we were providing for dangers that were direct, home, pressing, and not remote, contingent, uncertain, and formed upon loose analogies.

But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tigers that are in our antechambers and our lobbies.

I certainly should dread more from a wild-cat in my bedchamber than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind Algiers.

I can look at him with an easy curiosity, as prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the Tower.

I can contemplate without dread a royal or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu.

I, for one, do more than doubt the policy of this kind of convention with Algiers.

Because we have done one humiliating act, we ought with infinite caution to admit more acts of the same nature, lest humiliation should become our habitual state.

There are many things which men do not approve, that they must do to avoid a greater evil.

If it had no force to prevent us from submitting to this necessary war, it furnishes no better ground for our making an unnecessary and ruinous peace.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

This example we shall give, if, instead of adhering to our fellows in a cause which is an honor to us all, we abandon the lawful government and lawful corporate body of France, to hunt for a shameful and ruinous fraternity with this odious…

Whilst kings stand firm on their base, though under that base there is a sure-wrought mine, there will not be wanting to their levees a single person of those who are attached to their fortune, and not to their persons or cause; but…

Would not this warm language of high indignation have more of sound reason in it, more of real affection, more of true attachment, than all the lullabies of flatterers who would hush monarchs to sleep in the arms of death?

Their cry is the voice of sacred misery, exalted, not into wild raving, but into the sanctified frenzy of prophecy and inspiration.