Edmund Burke

They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power.

This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American war.

The whole is delusion, from one end to the other.

For a subordinate arbitrary or even despotic power never was heard of in right, claim, or authorized practice; least of all has it been heard of in the Eastern governments, where all the instances of severity and cruelty fall upon…

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

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

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.

And if any man will produce the Koran to me, and will but show me one text in it that authorizes in any degree an arbitrary power in the government, I will confess that I have read that book, and been conversant in the affairs of Asia, in…

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.

All the relations of life are at once dissolved.

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…

The next part in which he misses of a sovereign power is, that he cannot dispose of the life, of the property, or of the liberty of any of his subjects, but by what is called the fetwah, or sentence of the law.

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.

Such another example of boldness and contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.

So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English.

The question is, whether you will take the constitution of the country as your rule, or the base practices of those usurpers, robbers, and tyrants who have subverted it.

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!

He claims glory and renown from that by which every other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and disgraced.

It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.

But if we may judge by those ten precepts of Genghiz Khân which we have, there is not a shadow of arbitrary power to be found in any one of them.

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…

He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers.

My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character.

And I loved the dervishes and the poor; and I oppressed them not, neither did I exclude them from my favor.

A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion.