Edmund Burke

The people may err in their choice; but common interest and common sentiment are rarely mistaken.

It possesses most of its advantages, and is free from many of its inconveniences; it corrects the irregularities in the literal representation, when the shifting current of human affairs or the acting of public interests in different ways…

Such a representation I think to be in many cases even better than the actual.

Virtual representation is that in which there is a communion of interests and a sympathy in feelings and desires between those who act in the name of any description of people and the people in whose name they act, though the trustees are…

That discretion, which in judicature is well said by Lord Coke to be a crooked cord, in legislature is a golden rule.

But if the question was to be put to you and me,--Universal popular representation, or none at all for us and ours,--we should find ourselves in a very awkward position.

But I cannot think it right of course to punish the Irish Roman Catholics by an universal exclusion, because others, whom you would not punish at all, propose an universal admission.

With them, there is boundless, though not very assured hope; with you, a very sure and very unqualified despair.

But no man affronts me, nor can therefore justify my affronting him, by offering to make me as happy as himself, according to his own ideas of happiness.

I have no sword; and if I had, in this case, most certainly, I would not use it as a makeweight in political reasoning.

Know--and take it once for all--that it is, and ever has been, and ever will be, a fundamental maxim in our politics, that you are not to have any part or shadow or name of interest whatever in our state; that we look upon you as under an…

We can bear with patience their enmity to ourselves; but their friendship with you we will not endure.

We mean to cultivate them, as brethren whom we love and respect;--with you we have no fellowship.

It is known, I believe, that the greater as well as the sounder part of our excluded countrymen have not adopted the wild ideas and wilder engagements which have been held out to them, but have rather chosen to hope small and safe…

It would be strange that the tempter should escape all punishment, and that he who, under circumstances full of seduction and full of provocation, has resisted the temptation should incur the penalty.

A man must be judged by his own actions only.

It is the manner in which all the sovereign powers of the world are approached; and I never heard (except in the case of James the Second) that any prince considered this manner of supplication to be contrary to the humility of a subject…

But as the refusal of franchises which are drawn out of the first vital stamina of the British Constitution is a very serious thing, we ought to be very sure that the manner and spirit of the application is offensive and dangerous indeed…

A concession in which the governing power of our country loses its dignity is dearly bought even by him who obtains his object.

I hope the people, both here and with you, will always apply to the House of Commons with becoming modesty, but at the same time with minds unembarrassed with any sort of terror.

For though Cato could use such a parallel with regard to his Senate, I should really think it nothing short of impious to compare an Irish Parliament to a den of Cyclops.

But I conceive too high an opinion of the Irish legislature to think that they are to their fellow-citizens what the grand oppressors of mankind were to a people whom the fortune of war had subjected to their power.

I think arguments of this kind will never be used by the friends of a government which I greatly respect, or by any of the leaders of an opposition whom I have the honor to know and the sense to admire.

But what is to them a very full justification is not quite so honorable to that power from whose maxims and temper so good a ground of rational terror is furnished.

There is, indeed, one supposition which would reconcile the conduct of such gentlemen to sound reason, and to the purest affection towards their fellow-sufferers: it is, that they act under the impression of a well-grounded fear for the…