Edmund Burke

They choose to make monarchy contemptible by exposing it to derision in the person of the most benevolent of their kings.

The usurpation no longer seeks plausibility: it trusts to power.

But pretexts and sophisms have had their day, and have done their work.

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice; and whilst the currency of false pretence and sophistic reasoning was expedient to their designs, they were under no necessity of drawing upon me to furnish them with that coin.

Now that the monster can purvey for its own subsistence, it will only carry the mark about it, as a token of its having torn the womb it came from.

They used it as a sort of navel-string to nourish their unnatural offspring from the bowels of royalty itself.

They only held out the royal name to catch those Frenchmen to whom the name of king is still venerable.

I certainly meant to show, to the best of my power, that the existence of such an executive officer in such a system of republic as theirs is absurd in the highest degree.

You are of opinion, Sir, that the usurpers may, and that they will, gladly lay hold of any pretext to throw off the very name of a king: assuredly, I do not wish ill to your king; but better for him not to live (he does not reign) than to…

Provident patriots did not think it good for Rome that even Carthage should be quite destroyed; and he was a wise Greek, wise for the general Grecian interests, as well as a brave Lacedæmonian enemy and generous conqueror, who did not…

I do not conceive that the total annihilation of France (if that could be effected) is a desirable thing to Europe, or even to this its rival nation.

But not to make a common cause with a just prince, dethroned by traitors and rebels, who proscribe, plunder, confiscate, and in every way cruelly oppress their fellow-citizens, in my opinion is to forget what is due to the honor and to the…

For this, by an example hitherto unheard of in the world, he has been deposed.

The only offence of this unhappy monarch towards his people was his attempt, under a monarchy, to give them a free Constitution.

What mercy would these usurpers have on other sovereigns, and on other nations, when they treat their own king with such unparalleled indignities, and so cruelly oppress their own countrymen?

There is a power always on the watch, qualified and disposed to profit of every conjuncture, to establish its own principles and modes of mischief, wherever it can hope for success.

They ought not now, in my opinion, to suffer all the monarchies and commonwealths to be swallowed up in the gulf of this polluted anarchy.

The princes of Europe, in the beginning of this century, did well not to suffer the monarchy of France to swallow up the others.

It may be given by those neighbors on motives of safety to themselves.

It may be given to you in pity: for surely no nation ever called so pathetically on the compassion of all its neighbors.

This power, to such men, must come from without.

The sound part of the community, which I believe to be large, but by no means the largest part, has been taken by surprise, and is disjointed, terrified, and disarmed.

These madmen, to be cured, must first, like other madmen, be subdued.

As to a change of mind in those men, who consider infamy as honor, degradation as preferment, bondage to low tyrants as liberty, and the practical scorn and contumely of their upstart masters as marks of respect and homage, I look upon it…

But the deluded people of France are like other madmen, who, to a miracle, bear hunger, and thirst, and cold, and confinement, and the chains and lash of their keeper, whilst all the while they support themselves by the imagination that…