Edmund Burke

What lesson does it give of moderation to the Emperor, whose predecessor never put one man to death after a general rebellion of the Low Countries, that the Regicides never spared man, woman, or child, whom they but suspected of dislike to…

As to the example to be learnt from the murder of Louis the Sixteenth, if a lesson to kings is not derived from his fate, I do not know whence it can come.

Is it, then, true, that this unfortunate monarch drew his punishment upon himself by his want of moderation, and his oppressing the liberties of which he had found his people in possession?

I must do justice to suffering honor, generosity, and integrity.

I do not know that any time or any country has furnished more splendid examples of every virtue, domestic and public.

Many of them, I am sure, were such as I should be proud indeed to be able to compare myself with, in knowledge, in integrity, and in every other virtue.

My feeble nature might shrink, though theirs did not, from the proof; but my reason and my ambition tell me that it would be a good bargain to purchase their merits with their fate.

What were the abominations of Malesherbes, that other excellent magistrate, whose sixty years of uniform virtue was acknowledged, in the very act of his murder, by the judicial butchers who condemned him?

Was she a person so very ferocious and cruel, as, by the example of her death, to frighten us into common humanity?

Is this a lesson of moderation to a descendant of Maria Theresa, drawn from the fate of the daughter of that incomparable woman and sovereign?

If he learns this lesson from such an object, and from such teachers, the man may remain, but the king is deposed.

If he does not carry quite another memory of that transaction in the inmost recesses of his heart, he is unworthy to reign, he is unworthy to live.

For which of the vices of that pattern of benevolence, of piety, and of all the virtues, did they put her to death?

The more forcibly I drive my arguments against their system, so as to make an impression where I wish to make it, the more strongly I rivet them in their sentiments.

As for us, who compose the far larger, and what I call the far better part of the people, let me say, that we have not been quite fairly dealt with, when called to this deliberation.

The crowd readily followed the politicians in the cry for a war which threatened little bloodshed, and which promised victories that were attended with something more solid than glory.

He can only maintain it by an appeal to the higher; and to those in whom that higher part is the most predominant he must look the most for his support.

Whilst he holds out no inducements to the wise nor bribes to the avaricious, he may be forced by a vulgar cry into a peace ten times more ruinous than the most disastrous war.

The weaker he is in the fund of motives which apply to our avarice, to our laziness, and to our lassitude, if he means to carry the war to any end at all, the stronger he ought to be in his addresses to our magnanimity and to our reason.

His adversaries had the better of the argument as he handled it, not as the reason and justice of his cause enabled him to manage it.

They perfectly satisfied me of the extreme injustice of that war, and of the falsehood of the colors which, to his own ruin, and guided by a mistaken policy, he suffered to be daubed over that measure.

They who stir up the people to improper desires, whether of peace or war, will be condemned by themselves.

They who weakly yield to them will be condemned by history.

They throw the light on one side only of their case; though it is impossible they should not observe that the other side, which is kept in the shade, has its importance too.

France is considered as merely a foreign power, and the seditious English only as a domestic faction.