Edmund Burke

But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt.

I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind.

Let me add, that we are as unwilling to learn these lessons from France as we are sure that we never taught them to that nation.

We felt for them as men; but we kept aloof from them, because we were not citizens of France.

But when we see the model held up to ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen, and, feeling, we must provide as Englishmen.

If it be a panacea, we do not want it: we know the consequences of unnecessary physic.

If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it.

We shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction.

If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on Atheism to explain them.

We shall not light up our temple from that unhallowed fire.

Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the Protestant: not because we think it has less of the Christian religion in it, but because, in our judgment…

Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers.

We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages.

We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us.

In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails: we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true…

We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man.

We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity.

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of…

Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved.

We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal.

We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long.

On these ideas, instead of quarrelling with establishments, as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them.

We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.

You do, in spite of your grand theories, to which you would have heaven and earth to bend, you do know how to conform yourselves to the nature and circumstances of things.