We seem to have cut ourselves off from any benefit which an intermediate state of things might furnish to enable us totally to overturn that power, so little connected with moderation and justice.
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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Much evil has been done in India under the British authority.
If they are universally depraved, the commonwealth itself is not sound.
I hope I misunderstand this pledge,--or that we shall show no more regard to it than we have done to all the faith that we have plighted to vigor and resolution in our former Declaration.
Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest forms.
It is by bribing, not so often by being bribed, that wicked politicians bring rum on mankind.
We ought to have acted under her auspices, in extending her salutary influence upon every side.
All the former correctives, whether of virtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone.
This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said.
I parted with it as with a limb, but as a limb to save the body: and I would have parted with more, if more had been necessary; anything rather than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war.
Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself.
A silent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, and prepared it.
The state has dominion and conquest for its sole objects,--dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms.
These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make provision for the arrears…
Will the Allies, then, give away their ancient patrimony, that England may keep islands in the West Indies?
With you a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without a speculation.
While these dispositions shall be persisted in, nothing is left for the king but to prosecute a war equally just and necessary.
Did an honest creditor ever refuse that reasonable and honest test?
I could not at once tear from my heart prejudices which were dear to me, and which bore a resemblance to virtue.
I do not know, that any time, or any country, has furnished more splendid examples of every virtue, domestic and public.
It must be some portentous thing, like regicide France, that can exhibit such a prodigy.
We judged of the danger with which we were menaced by Jacobin France from the whole tenor of her conduct, not from one or two doubtful or detached acts or expressions.
Therefore I am apprehensive, that this bill, though it shifts the place of the disorder, does by no means relieve the constitution.
The time was come to restore royalty to its original splendour.
I certainly should dread more from a wild-cat in my bedchamber than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind Algiers.
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