Edmund Burke

It is the soul to the body, without which the man does not exist.

Men, qualified in the manner I have just described, form in Nature, as she operates in the common modification of society, the leading, guiding, and governing part.

For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated and most predominates.

A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it.

Numbers in a state (supposing, which is not the case in France, that a state does exist) are always of consideration,--but they are not the whole consideration.

Give once a certain constitution of things which produces a variety of conditions and circumstances in a state, and there is in Nature and reason a principle which, for their own benefit, postpones, not the interest, but the judgment, of…

When the multitude are not under this discipline, they can scarcely be said to be in civil society.

What policy can there be found in arrangements made in defiance of every political principle?

And I see as little of policy or utility as there is of right, in laying down a principle that a majority of men told by the head are to be considered as the people, and that as such their will is to be law.

They subvert all the authority which they hold, as well as all that which they have destroyed.

By what they call reasoning without prejudice, they leave not one stone upon another in the fabric of human society.

Who are they that presume to assert that the land which I purchased of the individual, a natural person, and not a fiction of state, belongs to them, who in the very capacity in which they make their claim can exist only as an imaginary…

I have a right to pitch my tent in any unoccupied place I can find for it; and I may apply to my own maintenance any part of their unoccupied soil.

On the scheme of the present rulers in our neighboring country, regenerated as they are, they have no more right to the territory called France than I have.

As a people can have no right to a corporate capacity without universal consent, so neither have they a right to hold exclusively any lands in the name and title of a corporation.

On every principle which supposes society to be in virtue of a free covenant, this compulsive incorporation must be null and void.

If any of these is forced into the fellowship of another, this is conquest and not compact.

Any number of individuals, who can agree upon it, have an undoubted right to form themselves into a state apart and wholly independent.

If men dissolve their ancient incorporation in order to regenerate their community, in that state of things each man has a right, if he pleases, to remain an individual.

In our judicial trials we require unanimity either to condemn or to absolve.

What organ it is that shall declare the corporate mind is so much a matter of positive arrangement, that several states, for the validity of several of their acts, have required a proportion of voices much greater than that of a mere…

For there the beaten party are exasperated and soured by the previous contention, and mortified by the conclusive defeat.

The mind is brought far more easily to acquiesce in the proceedings of one man, or a few, who act under a general procuration for the state, than in the vote of a victorious majority in councils in which every man has his share in the…

We are so little affected by things which are habitual, that we consider this idea of the decision of a majority as if it were a law of our original nature.

But amongst men so disbanded there can be no such thing as majority or minority, or power in any one person to bind another.