Edmund Burke

If I had acted with my dearest and most valued friends, if I had acted with the Marquis of Rockingham or the Duke of Richmond, in that situation, I could not have attended more to their honor, or endeavored more earnestly to give efficacy…

And the sense of the members being influenced by nothing but what will naturally influence men unbought, their reason and their prejudices, these two principles had a fair conflict, and prejudice was obliged to give way to reason.

The ministers, instead of attending to a duty that was so urgent on them, employed themselves, as usual, in endeavors to destroy the reputation of those who were bold enough to remind them of it.

I need not inform you, that everything they asserted of the steps taken in Ireland, as the result of our machinations, was utterly false and groundless.

What was done in Ireland during that period, in and out of Parliament, never will be forgotten.

You raised an army new in its kind and adequate to its purposes.

It was not under the authority of law, most certainly, but it derived from an authority still higher; and as they say of faith, that it is not contrary to reason, but above it, so this army did not so much contradict the spirit of the law…

How are we to consider your armament without commission from the crown, when some of the first people in this kingdom have been refused arms, at the time they did not only not reject, but solicited the king's commissions?

You shortened the credit given to the crown to six months; you hung up the public credit of your kingdom by a thread; you refused to raise any taxes, whilst you confessed the public debt and public exigencies to be great and urgent beyond…

What do you think were the feelings of every man who looks upon Parliament in an higher light than that of a market-overt for legalizing a base traffic of votes and pensions, when he saw you employ such means of coercion to the crown, in…

But as to us, you declared to the world that you knew that the way of bringing us to reason was to apply yourselves to the true source of all our opinions and the only motive to all our conduct!

Now, it seems, you think yourselves affronted, because a few of us express some indignation at the minister who has thought fit to strip us stark naked, and expose the true state of our poxed and pestilential habit to the world!

Think or say what you will in Ireland, I shall ever think it a crime hardly to be expiated by his blood.

That it should be a matter of public discretion in me to be silent on the affairs of Ireland is what on all accounts I bitterly lament.

I stated to the House what I felt; and I felt, as strongly as human sensibility can feel, the extinction of my Parliamentary capacity, where I wished to use it most.

In that opinion, one of the chief pleasures in my situation, what was first and-uppermost in my thoughts, was the hope, without injury to this country, to be somewhat useful to the place of my birth and education, which in many respects…

We tremble at the idea of a disunion of these two nations.

The only thing in which we differ with you is this,--that we do not think your attaching yourselves to the court and quarrelling with the independent part of this people is the way to promote the union of two free countries, or of holding…

I shall be concerned for this, and very much so; but I should be more concerned, if, in gratifying a present humor of theirs, I had rendered myself unworthy of their former or their future choice.

I never heard a more elaborate, more able, more convincing, and more shameful speech.

The debater obtained credit, but the statesman was disgraced forever.

Amends were made for having refused small, but timely concessions, by an unlimited and untimely surrender, not only of every one of the objects of former restraints, but virtually of the whole legislative power itself which had made them.

But however the king and his ministers may settle the question of his dignity and his rights, I thought it became me, by vigilance and foresight, to take care of yours: I thought I ought rather to lighten the ship in time than expose it to…

I stood, therefore, silent with grief and vexation, on that day of the signal shame and humiliation of this degraded king and country.

But, thank God, my letter to Bristol was in print, my sentiments on the policy of the measure were known and determined, and such as no man could think me absurd enough to contradict.