Edmund Burke

He cannot assert the democratic part on the principles on which monarchy is supported, nor can he support monarchy on the principles of democracy, nor can he maintain aristocracy on the grounds of the one or of the other or of both.

Accusations sometimes derive a weight from the persons who make them to which they are not entitled from their matter.

I believe, if he could venture to value himself upon anything, it is on the virtue of consistency that he would value himself the most.

It is not so much that he is wrong in his book (that, however, is alleged also) as that he has therein belied his whole life.

It is certainly a great aggravation of his fault in embracing false opinions, that in doing so he is not supposed to fill up a void, but that he is guilty of a dereliction of opinions that are true and laudable.

He must believe, if he does not mean wilfully to abandon his cause and his reputation, that principles fundamentally at variance with those of his book are fundamentally false.

They well knew that he felt like other men; and of course he would think it mean and unworthy to decline asserting in his place, and in the front of able adversaries, the principles of what he had penned in his closet and without an…

Let them say at once that his reputation is of no value, and that he has no call to assert it,--but that theirs is of infinite concern to the party and the public, and to that consideration he ought to sacrifice all his opinions and all…

He could not enjoy one moment of domestic quiet, he could not perform the least particle of public duty, if he did not altogether disregard the language of those libels.

Deliberate injuries, to a degree, must be remembered, because they require deliberate precautions to be secured against their return.

Have we not obliged the members of every future Assembly to qualify themselves for their seats by swearing to its conservation?

Have we not bound it on posterity forever, though our abettors have declared that no one generation is competent to bind another?

Have we not solemnly declared this Constitution unalterable by any future legislature?

Have we not sworn our devout, profane, believing, infidel people to an allegiance to this goddess, even before she had burst the dura mater, and as yet existed only in embryo?

Have we not produced it ready-made and ready-armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain of Jupiter himself?

What! alter our sublime Constitution, the glory of France, the envy of the world, the pattern for mankind, the masterpiece of legislation, the collected and concentrated glory of this enlightened age?

It must be shown that it is right, though imperfect,--that it is not only by possibility susceptible of improvement, but that it contains in it a principle tending to its melioration.

When any political institution is praised, in spite of great and prominent faults of every kind, and in all its parts, it must be supposed to have something excellent in its fundamental principles.

They do not talk as politicians, but as prophets.

The English admirers of the forty-eight thousand republics which form the French federation praise them not for what they are, but for what they are to become.

How dare they to say so who have never made that experiment?

They who have brought France to its present condition ought to prove also, by something better than prattling about the Bastile, that their subverted government was as incapable as the present certainly is of all improvement and correction.

It must always be, to those who are the greatest amateurs, or even professors, of revolutions, a matter very hard to prove, that the late French government was so bad that nothing worse in the infinite devices of men could come in its…

Every revolution contains in it something of evil.

If ever we ought to be economists even to parsimony, it is in the voluntary production of evil.