Date: 1790

"Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"The worst of these politics of revolution is this; they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by their depravation."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and ...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in an hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembick of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"This principle ought even to be more strongly impressed upon the minds of those who compose the collective sovereignty than upon those of single princes."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"When they are habitually convinced that no evil can be acceptable, either in the act or the permission, to him whose essence is good, they will be better able to extirpate out of the minds of all magistrates, civil, ecclesiastical, or military, any thing that bears the least resemblance to a pro...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)