Edmund Burke

Whatever his inward intentions may have been, did Louis the Fourteenth ever make a declaration that the true bounds of France were the ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Rhine?

At the close of the war, almost in every instance victorious, all Europe was astonished, even those who received them were astonished, at his concessions.

Let them open their own eyes, which degeneracy and pusillanimity have shut from the light that pains them, and let them not vainly seek their security in a voluntary ignorance of their danger.

We have discovered, it seems, that all which the boasted wisdom of our ancestors has labored to bring to perfection for six or seven centuries is nearly, or altogether, matched in six or seven days, at the leisure hours and sober intervals…

By these hazarded speculations France is more approximated to us in constitution than in situation; and in proportion as we recede from the ancient system of Europe, we approach to that connection which alone can remain to us, a close…

What seemed to us to be the best system of liberty that a nation ever enjoyed to them seems the yoke of an intolerable slavery.

The French Revolution did not cause it: it only discovered it, increased it, and gave fresh vigor to its operations.

They are always considering the formal distributions of power in a constitution: the moral basis they consider as nothing.

Very different is my opinion: I consider the moral basis as everything,--the formal arrangements, further than as they promote the moral principles of government, and the keeping desperately wicked persons as the subjects of laws and not…

What signifies the cutting and shuffling of cards, while the pack still remains the same?

As a basis for such a connection as has subsisted between the powers of Europe, we had nothing to fear, but from the lapses and frailties of men,--and that was enough; but this new pretended republic has given us more to apprehend from…

Avowedly and systematically, they have given the upperhand to all the vicious and degenerate part of human nature.

It is from their lapses and deviations from their principle that alone we have anything to hope.

It is the old bon-ton of robbers, who cast their common crimes on the wickedness of their departed associates.

I rejoiced at his punishment neither more nor less than I should at the execution of the present Directory, or any of its members.

But who gave Robespierre the power of being a tyrant? and who were the instruments of his tyranny?

They have always had the knife at each other's throats, after they had almost blunted it at the throats of every honest man.

But this last act of infidelity and murder is to expiate all the rest, and to qualify them for the amity of an humane and virtuous sovereign and civilized people.

I have heard that a Tartar believes, when he has killed a man, that all his estimable qualities pass with his clothes and arms to the murderer; but I have never heard that it was the opinion of any savage Scythian, that, if he kills a…

The murderers of Robespierre, besides what they are entitled to by being engaged in the same tontine of infamy, are his representatives, have inherited all his murderous qualities, in addition to their own private stock.

But it seems we are always to be of a party with the last and victorious assassins.

I confess I am of a different mind, and am rather inclined, of the two, to think and speak less hardly of a dead ruffian than to associate with the living.

I could better bear the stench of the gibbeted murderer than the society of the bloody felons who yet annoy the world.

Murderers and hogs never look well till they are hanged.

From villany no good can arise, but in the example of its fate.