Edmund Burke

For when you stipulate to pay out of the treasury of government a certain pension, and take upon you the receipts of an estate, you adopt a measure by which government is almost sure of being a loser.

I can conceive that such a measure will render these persons miserable dependants instead of independent nobility; but I cannot conceive what financial object can be answered by paying that in pension which you are to receive in revenue.

You shake the security of property, and, instead of suffering a man to gather his own profits with his own hands, you turn him into a pensioner upon the public treasury.

For dignity and property in this country, Esto perpetua shall be my prayer this day, and the last prayer of my life.

I like to see your estates as great as they are; I wish they were greater than they are; but whatever they are, I wish, above all that they should be perpetual.

I will venture to say that Jacobinism never can strike a more deadly blow against property, rank, and dignity than your Lordships, if you were to acquit this man, would strike against your own dignity, and the very being of the society in…

If the act had been legal, proper, and justifiable, he did not want our permission; he was a sovereign in his own dominions.

He does not force upon him this abandoned and wicked confiscation of the property of the whole nobility of a great country.

He had ravaged the country, without obtaining any benefit for his masters: the British soldiers having divided the only spoil, and nothing remaining for the share of his employers but disgrace.

Here, then, your Lordships have a prince first compelled to enter into a negotiation, and then induced to accede to a treaty by false assurances that it should not be executed, which he declares nothing but force should otherwise have…

Now a man who is master of the manner in which facts are represented, and whose subsequent conduct is to be justified by such representations, is not simply accountable for his conduct; he is accountable for culpably attempting to form, on…

And to wind up all, we have shown you an army so corrupted as to pervert the fundamental principles of justice, which are the elements and basis of military discipline.

You have seen a clandestine and fraudulent system, occasioning violence and rapine; and you have seen the prisoner at the bar acknowledging and denouncing an abandoned spirit of rapacity without bringing its ministers to justice, and…

Hastings usurped all power, reduced the prince to a cipher, and made of his minister a mere creature of his own,--how he made the servants of the Company dependent on his own arbitrary will, and considered independence a proof of…

He was the primary and sole cause of all the grievances, civil and military, to which the unhappy natives of that country were exposed; and he was the accuser of all the immediate authors of those grievances, without having punished any…

He redressed no grievance; he formed no improvements in the government; he never attempted to provide a remedy without increasing the evil tenfold.

I defy the ingenuity of man to show that the honor of Great Britain has not been tarnished under his patronage.

You see the character given of that service; you there see their accuser, you there see their defender, who, after having defamed both services, military and civil, never punished the guilty in either, and now receives the prodigal praises…

But neither blood nor power is represented so fully in the House of Commons as that order which composes the great body of the people,--the protection of which is our peculiar duty, and to which it is our glory to adhere.

We do, indeed, represent, by the knights of the shires, the landed interest; by our city and borough members we represent the trading interest; we represent the whole people of England collectively.

He puts them in a condition to plunder; he suffered no native authority or government to restrain them; and he never called a man to an account for these flagitious acts which he has thought proper to bring before his country in the most…

I not only charge him with being guilty of a thousand crimes, but I assert that there is not a soldier or a civil servant in India whose culpable acts are not owing to this man's example, connivance, and protection.

Are there no signs of this man's being a captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the spoilers of India were paid, disciplined, and supported?

It stands as fair, in the opinion both of the army and of the public, as any tribunal, in a country where all tribunals stand fair.

Perhaps there is not a tribunal in this country whose reputation is really more untainted than that of a court-martial.