Edmund Burke

In this proceeding the Whig principles, as applied to the Revolution and Settlement, are to be found, or they are to be found nowhere.

It would be a serious imputation upon the prudence of my friend, to have made even such trivial sacrifices as it was in his power to make for principles which he did not truly embrace or did not perfectly understand.

Foolish he would have been at that time of life (more foolish than any man who undertakes a public trust would be thought) to adhere to a cause which he, amongst all those who were engaged in it, had the least sanguine hopes of as a road…

I maintain that in his Reflections he has stated the Revolution and the Settlement upon their true principles of legal reason and constitutional policy.

That writer is too well read in men not to know how often the desire and design of a tyrannic domination lurks in the claim of an extravagant liberty.

When they attempt without disguise, not to win it from our affections, but to force it from our fears, they show, in the character of their means of obtaining it, the use they would make of their dominion.

No man would be more steady in preventing them from abusing those rights to the destruction of that happy order under which they enjoy them.

No man would set his face more determinedly against those who should attempt to deprive them, or any description of men, of the rights they possess.

But I believe that this injured writer will think it not at all inconsistent with his present duty or with his former life strenuously to oppose all the various partisans of destruction, let them begin where or when or how they will.

Let it speak for itself to the present age and to all posterity.

A spirit of reformation is never more consistent with itself than when it refuses to be rendered the means of destruction.

When his safety is effectually provided for, it then becomes the office of a friend to urge his faults and vices with all the energy of enlightened affection, to paint them in their most vivid colors, and to bring the moral patient to a…

But when the man is to be amended, and by amendment to be preserved, then the line of duty takes another direction.

It is our duty rather to palliate his errors and defects, or to cast them into the shade, and industriously to bring forward any good qualities that he may happen to possess.

I think it a duty, in that case, not to inflame the public mind against the obnoxious person by any exaggeration of his faults.

He, who, at the present time, is favorable or even fair to that system, must act towards it as towards a friend with frailties who is under the prosecution of implacable foes.

No man can be a friend to a tempered monarchy who bears a decided hatred to monarchy itself.

They who have raked into all history for the faults of kings, and who have aggravated every fault they have found, have acted consistently, because they acted as enemies.

The charge of abuses on the late monarchy of France was not intended to lead to its reformation, but to justify its destruction.

The complaints of a friend are things very different from the invectives of an enemy.

The purpose for which the abuses of government are brought into view forms a very material consideration in the mode of treating them.

Its very purpose is to make war with abuses,--not, indeed, to make war with the dead, but with those which live, and flourish, and reign.

He is certain that many, even in France, have been made sick of their theories by their very success in realizing them.

He has studied the form and spirit of republics very early in life; he has studied them with great attention, and with a mind undisturbed by affection or prejudice.

He thought that the circumstances and habits of every country, which it is always perilous and productive of the greatest calamities to force, are to decide upon the form of its government.