Parliament is a security provided for the protection of freedom, and not a subtile fiction, contrived to amuse the people in its place.
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.
gutenberg.org
They are the real rebels to the fair constitution and just supremacy of England.
In this miserable state we are still further depressed by the overbearing influence of the crown.
Assemblies that are met, and with a resolution to be all of a mind, are assemblies that can have no opinion at all of their own.
They have gone beyond even this: for every barrister, six clerk, attorney, or solicitor, is obliged to take a solemn oath not to employ persons of that persuasion,--no, not as hackney clerks, at the miserable salary of seven shillings a…
To this I answer, that the collateral security was meant to bind the crown, and to hold it firm to its engagements.
For a law against property is a law against industry,--the latter having always the former, and nothing else, for its object.
If anything is, one more than another, out of the power of man, it is to create a prejudice.
Whatever ill-humors are afloat in the state, they will be sure to discharge themselves in a mingled torrent in the Cloaca Maxima of Jacobinism.
You have no security for anything, but that they will become what are called Franco-Jacobins, and reject the whole together.
The bottom of this theory of persecution is false.
Is this, or anything like this, asked in favor of any human creature in Ireland?
I think, indeed, that Great Britain would be ruined by the separation of Ireland; but as there are degrees even in ruin, it would fall the most heavily on Ireland.
The Catholics of Ireland (as I have said) have the whole of our positive religion: our difference is only a negation of certain tenets of theirs.
Dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition.
The subscription to Scripture is the most astonishing idea I ever heard, and will amount to just nothing at all.
I would have toleration a part of establishment, as a principle favorable to Christianity, and as a part of Christianity.
Let it be considered, that this argument goes as strongly against connivance, which you allow, as against toleration, which you reject.
And if incapacity is voted to be inherent in expulsion, if expulsion be arbitrary, incapacity is arbitrary also.
My law should not depend upon the fluctuation of the closet or the complexion of men.
Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles.
They held that the life of a man was the only atonement for the life of a man.
Mere personal merit was then the only pretence to power.
The greatest kings and conquerors frequently resigned their crowns and shut themselves up in monasteries.
He first introduced the study of his native language into this island.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
