"[T]he things he hated are truly hateful. He hated the French revolutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for free men. And that philosophy is in fact radically evil and corrupting. No state can ever be conducted on its principles. For it holds that government is a matter of contract and deliberate arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of habit, bound together by innumerable threads of association, scarcely one of which has been deliberately placed. It holds that the object of government is liberty, whereas the true object of government is justice; not the advantage of one class, even though that class constitute the majority, but right equity in the adjustment of the interests of all classes. It assumes that government can be made over at will, but assumes it without the slightest historical foundation. For governments have never been successfully and permanently changed except by slow modification operating from generation to generation. It contradicted every principle that had been so laboriously brought to light in the slow stages of the growth of liberty in the only land in which liberty had then grown to great proportions. The history of England is a continuous thesis against revolution; and Burke would have been no true Englishman, had he not roused himself, even fanatically, if there were need, to keep such puerile doctrine out."
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Members of the Parliament of Great BritainPhilosophers from IrelandPoliticians from IrelandPeople from DublinAnglicans
Original Language: English
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Sources
Woodrow Wilson, 'The Interpreter of English Liberty', Mere Literature and Other Essays (1896), pp. 155-156
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
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Edmund Burke
1729 – 1797
irischer Staatsmann und Philosoph
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