"In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of slavery, through the whole course of our lives."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
pp. 128-129
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Reflections_on_the_Revolution_in_France
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Reflections on the Revolution in France
88 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Reflections on the Revolution in France →
Related Quotes
"I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he…"
"At some time or other, to be sure, all the beginners of dynasties were chosen by those who called them to govern. The…"
"If the principles of the Revolution of 1688 are anywhere to be found, it is in the statute called the Declaration of …"
"A few years after this period, a second opportunity offered for asserting a right of election to the crown. On the pr…"
"So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution to elect our kings that, if we had possessed …"
"A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."
"It is common with them to dispute as if they were in a conflict with some of those exploded fanatics of slavery, who …"
"Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is consi…"
"The question of dethroning or, if these gentlemen like the phrase better, "cashiering kings" will always be, as it ha…"
"It is with them a war or a revolution, or it is nothing. ... They have some change in the church or state, or both, c…"