Edmund Burke

I had (what I hope that noble Duke will remember in all his operations) a state to preserve, as well as a state to reform.

It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, that produced my plan of reform.

Our business is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are saddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation.

They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment.

The consequences are before us,--not in remote history, not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us.

The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all, unchanged.

It cannot at this time be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb,--To innovate is not to reform.

Reform is not a change in the substance or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of.

Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand.

I knew that there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding,--that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation.

It was my aim to give to the people the substance of what I knew they desired, and what I thought was right, whether they desired it or not, before it had been modified for them into senseless petitions.

This would have left a rankling wound in the hearts of the people, who would know they had failed in the accomplishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest of mankind in all ages, would impute the blame to anything rather than to their…

Nothing could have saved the public from the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity, which would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into discredit.

It extended to Parliament, which was losing not a little in its dignity and estimation by an opinion of its not acting on worthy motives.

On one hand, government, daily growing more invidious from an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness.

I found a great distemper in the commonwealth, and according to the nature of the evil and of the object I treated it.

Poor in my own faculties, I ever thought myself rich in theirs.

He is an ill-furnished undertaker who has no machinery but his own hands to work with.

To preserve the Constitution entire, and practically equal to all the great ends of its formation, not in one single part, but in all its parts, was to them the first object.

They did not wish that liberty, in itself one of the first of blessings, should in its perversion become the greatest curse which could fall upon mankind.

The liberty they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion,--and was neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed.

Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have had the honor of leading up the death-dance of democratic revolution.

Such was the distemper of the public mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.

We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body: we lost our colonies, but we kept our Constitution.

Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that time required something very different from what others then suggested or what his Grace now conceives.