Edmund Burke

The moneyed interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure, and its possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind.

It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change.

Nothing can lead more to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public confiscation with its new equity and its new morality, than an attention to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the clergy.

Can one hear of the proscription of such persons, and the confiscation of their effects, without indignation, and horror?

But by the new institute of the rights of men, the only persons who in equity ought to suffer are the only persons who are to be saved harmless: those are to answer the debt who neither were lenders nor borrowers, mortgagers nor mortgagees.

Causes thus powerful to acquire and to retain cannot be found in discouraged industry, insecure property, and a positively destructive government.

Nor do I discern the character of a government that has been on the whole so oppressive, or so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all reformation.

I must think such a government well deserved to have its excellences heightened, its faults corrected, and its capacities improved into a British Constitution.

The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigor of a juvenile activity.

You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers.

It is thus with all those who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under color of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing…

Such is the effect of the perversion of history by those who, for the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of learning.

But history in the nineteenth century, better understood and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous ages.

The time is fitted for the duty; and it is particularly becoming to show our justice and gratitude, when those who have deserved well of us and of mankind are laboring under popular obloquy and the persecutions of oppressive power.

Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in property.

It must be allowed in favor of those tyrants of antiquity, that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood.

They were driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension of the return of power with the return of property to the families of those they had injured beyond all hope of forgiveness.

With you, in your improved state of the human mind, there was no such formality.

Had fate reserved him to our times, four technical terms would have done his business, and saved him all this trouble; he needed nothing more than one short form of incantation:--"Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men.

I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny, which no voice has hitherto ever commended under any of their false colors; yet in these false colors an homage was paid by despotism to justice.

The power which was above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart, nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

This same wealth, which is at all times treason and lèze-nation to indigent and rapacious despotism, under all modes of polity, was your temptation to violate property, law, and religion, united in one object.

The service of the State was made a pretext to destroy the Church.

In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it,--instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation,--that it is…