Edmund Burke

The public must never be regarded as incurable.

Because the pulse seems to intermit, we must not presume that it will cease instantly to beat.

The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energy to the state.

Whilst our heart is whole, it will find means, or make them.

We are therefore never authorized to abandon our country to its fate, or to act or advise as if it had no resource.

The poison of other states is the food of the new Republic.

But the constitution of any political being, as well as that of any physical being, ought to be known, before one can venture to say what is fit for its conservation, or what is the proper means of its power.

The financial difficulties were only pretexts and instruments of those who accomplished the ruin of that monarchy; they were not the causes of it.

They were all either tacitly disposed to her or publicly connected with her; and in those who kept the most aloof there was little appearance of jealousy,--of animosity there was no appearance at all.

A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe, there was a kind of exterior splendor in the situation of the crown, which usually adds to government strength and authority at home.

This fall of the monarchy was far from being preceded by any exterior symptoms of decline.

By turns elevated and depressed, that power had been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued not only powerful, but formidable, to the hour of the total ruin of the monarchy.

A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.

The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation.

They have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning, and even in the depths of their calamity and on the very ruins of their country have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness.

At the very moment when some of them seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have suddenly emerged.

We are therefore obliged to deliver up that operation to mere chance, or, more piously, (perhaps more rationally,) to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the Great Disposer.

It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign and their known operation.

I am far from denying the operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much more obscure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign causes that tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a community.

They are artificial combinations, and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of the human mind.

But commonwealths are not physical, but moral essences.

The immediate cause acting in these laws may be obscure: the general results are subjects of certain calculation.

I am not quite of the mind of those speculators who seem assured that necessarily, and by the constitution of things, all states have the same periods of infancy, manhood, and decrepitude that are found in the individuals who compose them.

In all speculations upon men and human affairs, it is of no small moment to distinguish things of accident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered.

Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the conjectural world, our business is with what is likely to be affected, for the better or the worse, by the wisdom or weakness of our plans.