To a people who have once been proud and great, and great because they were proud, a change in the national spirit is the most terrible of all revolutions.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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We feared more from what threatened to fail within than what menaced to oppress us from abroad.
The disastrous events which have followed one upon another in a long, unbroken, funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to have no end,--these were not the principal causes of our dejection.
Nature there had secretly regained her rights, and had produced saltpetre, for the purpose, as it should seem, of facilitating the execution of your decree by preparing the means of destruction.
However, let his Grace think as he may of my demerits with regard to the war with Regicide, he will find my guilt confined to that alone.
We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.
Compassion for the myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who by their means have perished in prisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would leave no room in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such…
He felt that this nobility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for them.
It may be improved, it may be corrected, it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or aggregated to it; but the thing itself is matter of inveterate opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive institution.
He felt that no political fabric could be well made, without some such order of things as might, through a series of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state.
Without much speculation, but by the sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain, unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist without a body of some…
He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind,--conceiving that a man born in an elevated place in himself was nothing, but everything in what went before and what was to come after him.
He valued the old nobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity.
At my years we live in retrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds, the consolation of friendship, in those only whom we have lost forever.
No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and suffer with resignation what Providence pleases to command or inflict; but, indeed, they are sharp incommodities which beset old age.
Churches, play-houses, coffeehouses, all alike, are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended into one common rubbish,--and, well sifted, and lixiviated, to crystallize into true, democratic, explosive, insurrectionary nitre.
They have found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest for making other ruins, and so ad infinitum.
They consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention, in its present state, but, properly employed, an admirable material for overturning all establishments.
So that no constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in any shapes into…
They are a downright insult upon the rights of man.
Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them fearless of the danger which may from thence arise to others or to themselves.
The geometricians and the chemists bring, the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes which are the…
Their humanity is at their horizon,--and, like the horizon, it always flies before them.
Their imagination is not fatigued with the contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries of misery and desolation.
It is remarkable that they never see any way to their projected good but by the road of some evil.
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