Whether I have acted my part in it well or ill, posterity will judge with more candour than I, or than the present age, with our present passions, can possibly pretend to.
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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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.
Among those, the redress of wrongs, and the protection of weakness from the oppression of power, were most conspicuous.
All the relations of life are at once dissolved.
You are but just entering into the world; I am going out of it.
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…
We set out much in love with both: but we leave much behind us as we advance.
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.
But the passions which prop these opinions are withdrawn one after another; and the cool light of reason, at the setting of our life, shows us what a false splendour played upon these objects during our more sanguine seasons.
Such another example of boldness and contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.
If it does not make us knowing, it may make us modest.
So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English.
We must not attempt to fly, when we can scarcely pretend to creep.
God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices!
We ought to compare our subject with things of a similar nature, and even with things of a contrary nature; for discoveries may be, and often are, made by the contrast, which would escape us on the single view.
He claims glory and renown from that by which every other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and disgraced.
True religion has, and must have, a large mixture of salutary fear; and false religions have generally nothing else but fear to support them.
It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.
They had gloried (and some people in England had thought fit to take share in that glory) in making a Revolution, as if revolutions were good things in themselves.
The tenderness of the executive power is the natural asylum of those upon whom the laws have declared war; and to complain that men are inclined to favor the means of their own safety is so absurd, that one forgets the injustice in the…
The French have made their way, through the destruction of their country, to a bad constitution, when they were absolutely in possession of a good one.
He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers.
Instead of redressing grievances, and improving the fabric of their state, to which they were called by their monarch and sent by their country, they were made to take a very different course.
My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character.
A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
