Edmund Burke

They would reverently and affectionately protect all religions, because they love and venerate the great principle upon which they all agree, and the great object to which they are all directed.

They begin more and more plainly to discern that we have all a common cause, as against a common enemy.

But it is in the principle of injustice that the danger lies, and not in the description of persons on whom it is first exercised.

They were more fully educated than the military noblesse,--so as by no means to disgrace their profession by ignorance, or by want of fitness for the exercise of their authority.

They seemed to me, beyond the clerical character, liberal and open, with the hearts of gentlemen and men of honor, neither insolent nor servile in their manners and conduct.

It has made a degrading pensionary establishment, to which no man of liberal ideas or liberal condition will destine his children.

They who will not believe that the philosophical fanatics who guide in these matters have long entertained such a design are utterly ignorant of their character and proceedings.

This, in the present condition of the world, would be the last corruption of the Church, the utter ruin of the clerical character, the most dangerous shock that the state ever received through a misunderstood arrangement of religion.

This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

But the present ruling power has shown a disposition only to plunder the Church.

It has punished all prelates: which is to favor the vicious, at least in point of reputation.

All those who have affections which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate, which has been produced from those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments…

But they will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices and sinister…

To make a revolution is a measure which, primâ fronte, requires an apology.

To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding.

The sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to criticize on the use that is made of it, with less awe and reverence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority.

There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns.

What! a qualification on the indefeasible rights of men?

Other acts of irregular power, in their greatest excesses, still retain the characters of sovereign authority; but here the vices of the prince intrude into the families of the subject, and, whilst they aggravate the oppression, lower the…

Uxorious and yet dissolute in his manners, he made no scruple frequently to violate the wives and daughters of his nobility, that rock on which tyranny has so often split.

They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.

But though they were not able to exclude him from the succession, they had strength enough to oblige him to a solemn promise of restoring those liberties and franchises which they had always claimed without having ever enjoyed or even…

We shall behold the people, grown desperate, call in another foreign army, with a foreign prince at its head, and throw away that liberty which they had sacrificed everything to preserve.

Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.