Date: January 19, 1791
"It is that new invented virtue, which your masters canonize, that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence; whilst his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"He must have a heart of adamant who could hear a set of traitors puffed up with unexpected and undeserved power, obtained by an ignoble, unmanly, and perfidious rebellion, treating their honest fellow-citizens as rebels, because they refused to bind themselves, through their conscience, against ...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in pro...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"You know them but at a distance, on the statements of those who always flatter the reigning power, and who, amidst their representations of the grievances, inflame your minds against those who are oppressed. These are amongst the effects of unremitted labour, when men exhaust their attention, bu...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1794
"The mind is not a rasa tabula, though, at the same time, it must be allowed, we gain no actual knowledge of the latent ideas which it possesses, but as they are awakened by reflection and experience."
preview | full record— Sullivan, Richard Joseph, Sir (1752-1806)
Date: 1794
"The rasa tabula will not allow us to have mental ideas."
preview | full record— Sullivan, Richard Joseph, Sir (1752-1806)
Date: 1796
"The eye of the mind is dazzled and vanquished."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1796
"An ancient writer, Plutarch, I think it is, quotes some verses on the eloquence of Pericles, who is called "the only orator that left stings in the minds of his hearers." Like his, the eloquence of the declaration, not contradicting, but enforcing sentiments of the truest humanity, has left stin...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1796
"Cold as ice themselves, they never could kindle in our breasts a spark of that zeal, which is necessary to a conflict with an adverse zeal; much less were they made to infuse into our minds that stubborn persevering spirit, which alone is capable of bearing up against those vicissitudes of fortu...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)