My poor share in the support of that great measure no man shall ravish from me.
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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The first class of labour wants nothing to equalize it; it equalizes itself.
But history, in the nineteenth century, better understood, and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous ages.
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
To destroy any power, growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material.
Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
With a fixed design they have outlawed themselves, and to their power outlawed all other nations.
If the hoards of oppression were the fund for satisfying the claims of bribery and peculation, who would wish to interfere between such litigants?
They thought it a great deal better to make it wise and honest.
If I possess nothing else, I am sure I possess the temper that is fit for your service.
Here, Sir, is a canonical boot of ministerial scripture: the general epistle to the Americans.
The share of infamy, that is likely to fall to the lot of each individual in public acts, is small indeed; the operation of opinion being in the inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse power.
It is virtually one great state having the same basis of general law, with some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments.
The calculation of profit in all such wars is false.
Vicini vicinorum facta praesumuntur scire." This principle, which, like the rest, is as true of nations as of individual men, has bestowed on the grand vicinage of Europe a duty to know, and a right to prevent, any capital innovation which…
When the trial is by friends, if the decision should happen to be favourable, the honour of the acquittal is lessened; if adverse, the condemnation is exceedingly embittered.
It is made, if ever war was made, to touch all the great springs of action in the human breast.
I therefore consider the intermeddling of ministers in this affair as a downright usurpation.
But his doctrines, on the whole, are so inapplicable to real life and manners, that we never dream of drawing from them any rule for laws or conduct, or for fortifying or illustrating anything by a reference to his opinions.
In that state of things people behold in government nothing that is respectable.
Ireland, now so large a source of the common opulence and power, and which, wisely managed, might be made much more beneficial and much more effective, was then the heaviest of the burdens.
I am resolved this day to have nothing at all to do with the question of the right of taxation.
I know, that all parsimony is of a quality approaching to unkindness; and that (on some person or other) every reform must operate as a sort of punishment.
It is for us at present to recollect what we have been, and to consider what, if we please, we may be still.
The injury was from the crown: the redress was by Parliament.
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