Edmund Burke

It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right.

But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain and poverty and disease.

Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world.

But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men.

There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it.

I am stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth.

The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me.

But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better.

Let him (and I trust that yet he will) employ all the energy of his youth and all the resources of his wealth to crush rebellious principles which have no foundation in morals, and rebellious movements that have no provocation in tyranny.

Let him remit his rigor on the disproportion between merit and reward in others, and they will make no inquiry into the origin of his fortune.

Indeed, he will pardon me, he is a little mistaken: all virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford; all discernment did not lose its vision when his creator closed his eyes.

Why should he imagine that no king of England has been capable of judging of merit but King Henry the Eighth?

In the name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think that none but of the House of Russell are entitled to the favor of the crown?

I ended my services by a recorded and fully reasoned assertion on their own journals of their constitutional rights, and a vindication of their constitutional conduct.

My merits were in having had an active, though not always an ostentatious share, in every one act, without exception, of undisputed constitutional utility in my time, and in having supported, on all occasions, the authority, the…

My merit has been in resisting the power and pride of France, under any form of its rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zeal and earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it could assume,--the worst, indeed, which the…

Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom,--in which his Majesty shows an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of…

My endeavor was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it.

Mine has been in endeavoring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent, who, in the bad times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief governors, or confiscating demagogues…

The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on everything that was great and noble.

His grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door.

Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favorites became fierce and ravenous.

The lion, having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting.

They who, alive, were laughed at or pitied by all their acquaintance make as good a figure as the best of them in the pages of Guillim, Edmondson, and Collins.

Every general officer with them is a Marlborough, every statesman a Burleigh, every judge a Murray or a Yorke.