Edmund Burke

This lesson is taught through almost all the important pages of history; but never has it been taught so clearly and so awfully as at this hour.

Such is the nature of Jacobinism, such is the nature of man, that this system must be regarded either with enthusiastic admiration, or with the highest degree of detestation, resentment, and horror.

They who are not actively, and with decision and energy, against Jacobinism are its partisans.

In a cause like this, and in a time like the present, there is no neutrality.

It is true that in this present work, which the author professedly designed for an appeal to foreign nations and posterity, he has dressed up the philosophy of his own faction in as decent a garb as he could to make her appearance in…

But we are not secondary parties in this war; we are principals in the danger, and ought to be principals in the exertion.

If Europe could not be saved without our interposition, (most certainly it could not,) I am sure there is not an Englishman who would not blush to be left out of the general effort made in favor of the general safety.

When we see (as here we must see) in their true colors the character and policy of our enemies, our gratitude will become an active principle.

They will do justice to the wisdom and goodness of their sovereign and his Parliament, who have put them into a state of defence, in the war audaciously made upon us in favor of that kind of liberty.

They will know how to appreciate the liberty of France, which has been so much magnified in England.

He will be enabled to judge of the information of those who have undertaken to guide and enlighten us, and who, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen to paint the French Revolution and its consequences in brilliant and…

The unhappy author of this piece, with twenty of his associates, suffered together on the scaffold, after a trial the iniquity of which puts all description to defiance.

They had themselves shown in their proceedings against the late king how little the most fixed principles are to be relied upon, in their revolutionary Constitution.

As the first fruits of that insurrection grafted on insurrection, and of that rebellion improving upon rebellion, the sacred, irresponsible character of the members of the Convention was laughed to scorn.

Anarchy was to be cured by rebellion, as it had been caused by it.

Nothing but an armed insurrection against their anarchical authority could answer the purpose of the Girondins.

All hope of gaining them to the support of property, or to the acknowledgment of any law but their own will, was evidently vain and hopeless.

Paris, the mother of equality, was herself to be equalized.

Every part of their own policy comes round, and strikes at their own power and their own lives.

These, and some other towns, declared strongly against the principles of anarchy, and against the despotism of Paris.

But whilst they appeared to gain the Convention, and many of the outlying departments, they lost the city of Paris entirely and irrecoverably: it was fallen into the hands of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton.

Crimes had pioneered and made smooth the way for the march of the virtues, and from that time order and justice and a sacred regard for personal property were to become the rules for the new democracy.

Massacre is sometimes agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess, sometimes too continued an exercise of a revolutionary power.

The whole compass of the language is tried to find synonymes and circumlocutions for massacre and murder.

All the priests, all the loyalists, all the first essayists and novices of revolution in 1789, that could be found, were promiscuously put to death.