Edmund Burke

Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged.

They would soon see that criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.

Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end,--until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites.

Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance.

Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public.

Liberty is always to be estimated perfect as property is rendered insecure.

Embracing in their arms the carcasses of base criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime.

As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards of his person that were massacred in cold blood about him; as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his…

I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,--glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendor and joy.

Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom!

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by…

Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to…

All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which by a bland assimilation incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society…

All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own…

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal,--and an animal not of the highest order.

Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity.

The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide,--and if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too…

On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons,--so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.

But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.

These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law.

To a person who takes a view of the whole, the strength of Paris, thus formed, will appear a system of general weakness.