Edmund Burke

Sovereignty, as a matter of right, appertains to the nation only, and not to any individual; and a nation has at all times an inherent indefeasible right to abolish any form of government it finds inconvenient, and establish such as…

It is not, and from its nature cannot be, the property of any particular man or family, but of the whole community, at whose expense it is supported; and though by force or contrivance it has been usurped into an inheritance, the…

What is government more than the management of the affairs of a nation?

They now declaim as vehemently against the monarchy as on former occasions they treacherously flattered and soothed it.

Of the charters and corporations, to whose rights a few years ago these gentlemen were so tremblingly alive, they say, "that, when the people of England come to reflect upon them, they will, like France, annihilate those badges of…

They damn it in the mass, by declaring "that it does not arise out of the inherent rights of the people, as the National Assembly does in France, and whose name designates its original.

As to the House of Commons, they treat it far worse than the House of Lords or the crown have been ever treated.

They are thrown to the cannibal for prey, and the natural parent prepares the unnatural repast.

By the aristocratical law of primogenitureship, in a family of six children, five are exposed.

They have the confidence to say, "that it is a law against every law of Nature, and Nature herself calls for its destruction.

Their negative declaration obliges me to have recourse to the books which contain positive doctrines.

All we can gather from them is this,--that their principles are diametrically opposite to his.

I have only to wish that the nation may be as happy and as prosperous under the influence of the new light as it has been in the sober shade of the old obscurity.

If others, however, have obtained any of this extraordinary light, they will use it to guide them in their researches and their conduct.

He has learned nothing from the far greater number of them than a full certainty of their shallowness, levity, pride, petulance, presumption, and ignorance.

I hold them to have been, what the world thought them, men of deep understanding, open sincerity, and clear honor.

This supposition does as little credit to their integrity as their wisdom: it makes them at once hypocrites and fools.

Burke, it is, that the old Whigs oppose themselves still more strongly than he does against the doctrines which are now propagated with so much industry by those who would be thought their successors.

These are the doctrines held by the Whigs of the Revolution, delivered with as much solemnity, and as authentically at least, as any political dogmas were ever promulgated from the beginning of the world.

He considered the object of his enterprise not to be a precedent for further revolutions, but that it was the great end of his expedition to make such revolutions, so far as human power and wisdom could provide, unnecessary.

The necessity of the resistance at the Revolution was at that time obvious to every man.

These general rules of obedience may, upon a real necessity, admit a lawful exception; and such a necessary exception we assert the Revolution to be.

But yet they maintain that that resistance at the Revolution, which was so necessary, was lawful and just from that necessity.

And this may serve to show that it was not the design of those legislators to condemn resistance, in a case of absolute necessity, for preserving the Constitution, when they were guarding against principles which had so lately destroyed it.

It will show still more clearly the equal care of the then Whigs to prevent either the regal power from being swallowed up on pretence of popular rights, or the popular rights from being destroyed on pretence of regal prerogatives.