Great distress has never hitherto taught, and whilst the world lasts it never will teach, wise lessons to any part of mankind.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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When they have once tasted of the flattery of knaves, they can no longer endure reason, which appears to them only in the form of censure and reproach.
As to the people at large, when once these miserable sheep have broken the fold, and have got themselves loose, not from the restraint, but from the protection, of all the principles of natural authority and legitimate subordination, they…
You see their presumption in their promises is not lessened by all their failures in the performance.
The nation is sick, very sick, by their medicines.
They never give people possession; but they always keep them in hope.
Unluckily, too, the credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.
They have no virtue or wisdom in their minds, to which, in a disappointment concerning the profitable effects of fraud and cunning, they can retreat.
The fraudulent have no resource but in fraud.
As to the leaders in this system of imposture,--you know that cheats and deceivers never can repent.
They flatter themselves that the extreme misery brought upon the people by their folly will at last open the eyes of the multitude, if not of their leaders.
There is one case, indeed, in which it would be madness not to give the fullest credit to the most deceitful of men,--that is, when they make declarations of hostility against us.
But when men whom we know to be wicked impose upon us, we are something worse than dupes.
There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.
There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.
The indulgence of a sort of undefined hope, an obscure confidence, that some lurking remains of virtue, some degree of shame, might exist in the breasts of the oppressors of France, has been among the causes which have helped to bring on…
The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments,--success.
If you resist, you are accused of provoking irritable power to new excesses.
If you lie still, you are considered as an accomplice in the measures in which you silently acquiesce.
One of our strongest weapons against folly acting with authority would be lost.
If this kind of demonstration is not permitted, the process of reasoning called deductio ad absurdum, which even the severity of geometry does not reject, could not be employed at all in legislative discussions.
Proceeding, therefore, as we are obliged to proceed,--that is, upon an hypothesis that we address rational men,--can false political principles be more effectually exposed than by demonstrating that they lead to consequences directly…
It was the very same animal that at first crawled about in the shape of a caterpillar that you now see rise into the air and expand his wings to the sun.
They are the same men and the same designs that they were from the first, though varied in their appearance.
I may speak it upon an assurance almost approaching to absolute knowledge, that nothing has been done that has not been contrived from the beginning, even before the States had assembled.
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