Edmund Burke

The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.

The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good,--in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.

By these theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically confounded with their power.

The body of the community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence.

It is beyond doubt, that, under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all…

In these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius.

I confess to you, Sir, I never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the Constitution its daily bread.

This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, relaxes and wears out, by a vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that spirit which is to be exerted on great occasions.

Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.

They see no merit in the good, and no fault in the vicious management of public affairs; they rather rejoice in the latter, as more propitious to revolution.

I am as incapable of that injustice as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremes, and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics.

The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions.

This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.

Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart.

They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.

There a majority, sometimes real, sometimes pretended, captive itself, compels a captive king to issue as royal edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffee-houses.

It is notorious that all their measures are decided before they are debated.

The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty.

They have a power given to them, like that of the Evil Principle, to subvert and destroy,--but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction.

Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institute?

Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republics, must alike abhor it.

The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit.

The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory.

But History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget either those events, or the era of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of…

The member who goes to the National Assembly is not chosen by the people, nor accountable to them.