Edmund Burke

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.

I am resolved this day to have nothing at all to do with the question of the right of taxation.

In that state of things people behold in government nothing that is respectable.

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.

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.

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…

It is virtually one great state having the same basis of general law, with some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments.

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.

Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

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.

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.

The first class of labour wants nothing to equalize it; it equalizes itself.

The time was come to restore royalty to its original splendour.

Therefore I am apprehensive, that this bill, though it shifts the place of the disorder, does by no means relieve the constitution.

It must be some portentous thing, like regicide France, that can exhibit such a prodigy.

I do not know, that any time, or any country, has furnished more splendid examples of every virtue, domestic and public.

With you a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without a speculation.

On this head the parent law is express and clear, and has made many wise provisions, which, without destroying, regulate and restrain the right of ownership by the right of vicinage.

Instead of the religion and the law by which they were in a great politic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their republic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are…

Its foundation is laid in Regicide, in Jacobinism, and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles a body of systematic manners which secures their operation.

It has ever been the method of public jurists to draw a great part of the analogies on which they form the law of nations from the principles of law which prevail in civil community.

Those which are rather conclusions of legal reason than matters of statutable provision belong to universal equity, and are universally applicable.

There is a law of neighborhood which does not leave a man perfect master on his own ground.

When a neighbor sees a new erection, in the nature of a nuisance, set up at his door, he has a right to represent it to the judge, who, on his part, has a right to order the work to be stayed, or, if established, to be removed.

For there is a sort of presumption against novelty, drawn out of a deep consideration of human nature and human affairs; and the maxim of jurisprudence is well laid down, "Vetustas pro lege semper habetur.