Anglicans

"[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."

""We cannot, I fear," he says proudly of the colonies, "we cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery." Does not your blood stir at these passages? And is it not because, besides loving what is nobly written, you feel that every word strikes towards the heart of the things that have made your blood what it has proved to be in the history of our race?"

"He speaks from the relative stability of the eighteenth century against the first signs of the flux and confusion of the nineteenth century, but he speaks also against those rising doctrines which the eighteenth century had produced, and which were to become the characteristic philosophy of the change itself. In doing so, he prepared a position in the English mind from which the march of industrialism and liberalism was to be continually attacked. He established the idea of the State as the necessary agent of human perfection, and in terms of this idea the aggressive individualism of the nineteenth century was bound to be condemned. He established, further, the idea of what has been called an "organic society", where the emphasis is on the interrelation and continuity of human activities, rather than on separation into spheres of interest, each governed by its own laws."

"His Reflections were written in 1790, before there had been any degeneration in the moral fervours of the politicians in Paris, while Louis XVI still reigned and Robespierre was unheard of; and it was the arrival of the dooms Burke had prophesied that made him a major figure of his time. He spent the best part of the decade in a kind of mental thunderstorm, ending it with a plea that the place of his burial should be kept secret, lest vindictive democrats dug up his bones for desecration. On the whole, whatever the merit of these ringing arguments, his influence was bad. His opinions on the horrors of social revolution, and on the impropriety of any change at all, became the commonplaces of dinner-tables, and both the ethos and the methods of the landowners of England hardened accordingly."

"Burke believed that when all the basic institutions of society were stripped away, and men were thrown upon nothing but the resources of their private passions and reason, the result would be precisely the social anarchy, violence, terror, and wars that France experienced under the Revolution."

"Burke argued that all the nations of Europe had evolved from some fusion of Roman law, Christian morality, and Teutonic customs and manners, and that this complex of nations constituted a "commonwealth of Europe," the product of slow historical development over many centuries. Burke did not believe that history, as "the known march of the ordinary providence of God," contained any law of necessary progress, but he did believe that improvements in the civil-social life of the Europeans could and did continue to occur. He regarded all the basic institutions of society—family, church, state, schools, guilds, commercial organizations—all corporate bodies, as the necessary instrumental means for the full development of human nature in its spiritual and temporal dimensions. All such institutions were "natural"; that is, normal for man, the product of his will and reason, created artfully for his improvement. Burke summarized his defense of the institutions of civilization in an epigram: "Art is man's nature.""

"The sublime is particularly important as an aesthetic of the terrifying, which at a small remove is fascinating: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature," writes Edmund Burke in his seminal treatise on the sublime, "is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.""

"A story was told me by the late Earl Grey relating to himself and Mr. Burke. Lord Grey told me that on one occasion when in the House of Commons, as Mr. Grey, he had been speaking with considerable force of language and greater vehemence of tone than some persons might have thought seemly. On resuming his seat, he said to Mr. Burke, “I hope I have not shown much temper.” “Temper!” replied Mr. Burke, “temper, sir, is the state of mind suited to the occasion!”"

"The conservative icon Edmund Burke complained that the French Revolution was unlike others because it had been led by "Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils"...From antiquity to the modern era, Jews have proven tremendously useful as an external enemy, or as a scapegoat for society's ills."

"To put Burke's point in a modern idiom somewhat removed from his own majestic periods: the knowledge that we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions, and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it."

"The wise policy is to accept the arrangements, however imperfect, that have evolved through custom and inheritance, to improve them by small adjustments, but not to jeopardise them by large-scale alterations the consequences of which nobody can really envisage. The case for this approach was unanswerably set before us by Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, and subsequent history has repeatedly confirmed his view of things. The lesson that we should draw, therefore, is that since the nation state has proved to be a stable foundation of democratic government and secular jurisdiction, we ought to improve it, adjust it, even to dilute it, but not to throw it away."

"Mr. Burke appeared often in despair when he read the Papers & saw how violent party rage was become in England as well as in France. He often said that he could not consider the party for a reform in part by Mr. Fox & his Friends as distinct from that party of Sir F. Burdet at the Crown & Anchor, because Mr. F— though he might have spoken against the last out of Doors, did not condemn it in parliam[en]t, which would be the manly way of proceeding."

"When some gentlemen of landed Property argued in favour of that Man's Works, and the rage for Democracy first broke out, Mr. Burke said, it reminded him of living in the happy Kingdom of Cocogne w[h]ere Fowls ready roasted cried out "Come eat me"."

"[Men of property are] of great consequence to general society; they have much responsibility, being a natural part of Legislature—their voices must be heard, their Interests are with the Public. Commerce increases Luxury, and Merchants support the State; but Kings, Nobles, and Gentry, are nothing without possessions."

"That since England had the principle, of making Peace with Anarchists she has left herself without a cause—that it is high time for all honest men to think no more of Party—that this Kingdom is in a most perillous State, & nothing but vigour can save it—that peace can not be secure in the present State of Things in France—that nothing was ever more regular nor systematical than the attempts there to conquer all Europe—that the Spirit of their Ambition is Atheistical, & our people should know this."

"Whether they are allowed to be Whigg principles, or not, is a very small part of my concern. I think them exactly as such as the sober, honourable, and intelligent part in that party, have always professed. I think, I have shewn, beyond a possibility of debate, that they are exactly the same. But if any person...choose to think otherwise, and conceive that they are contrary to the Doctrines of their Whigg party,—be it so. I am certain, that they are principles of which no reasonable man or good citizen need be ashamed of. If they are Tory principles, I shall always wish to be thought a Tory, If the contrary of these principles be Whigg principles, I beg, that you, my Dear Friend will never consider me as belonging to that description."

"Partial freedom seems to me the most invidious form of slavery."

"They talk as if England were not in Europe."

"There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world."

"To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue."

"The art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."

"When Croft's "Life of Dr. Young" was spoken of as a good imitation of Dr. Johnson's style, "No, no," said he, "it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration.""

"A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words."

"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."

"I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets."

"Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer."

"Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar."

"Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."

"We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation."

"Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property."

"All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth."

"If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed."

"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."

"All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities."

"...they who would make peace without a previous knowledge of the terms, make a surrender. They are conquered. They do not treat; they receive the law. Is this the disposition of the people of England? Then the people of England are contented to seek in the kindness of a foreign systematick enemy combined with a dangerous faction at home, a security which they cannot find in their own patriotism and their own courage. They are willing to trust to the sympathy of Regicides the guarantee of the British Monarchy. They are content to rest their religion on the piety of atheists by establishment. They are satisfied to seek in the clemency of practised murderers the security of their lives. They are pleased to confide their property to the safeguard of those who are robbers by inclination, interest, habit, and system. If this be our deliberate mind, truly we deserve to lose, what it is impossible we should long retain, the name of a nation."

"We are at war with a system, which, by it's essence, is inimical to all other Governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by it's essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country. To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our channel. It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil. Thus advantaged, if it can at all exist, it must finally prevail."

"They who bow to the enemy abroad will not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home."

"...out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man."

"We have an enemy, to whose virtues we can owe nothing; but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution."

"A great revolution is on the point of being accomplished. It is a revolution not in human affairs, but in man himself."

"Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment."

"Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy."

"But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion—as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land—so long as the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France."

"It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform."

"Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations — wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco."

"And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them."

"Free trade is not based on utility but on justice."

"The Whigs of this day have before them, in this Appeal, their constitutional ancestors: They have the doctors of the modern school. They will choose for themselves. The author of the Reflections has chosen for himself. If a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshipped as revelations, I say for him, that he would rather be the last (as certainly he is the least) of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution."

"We want no foreign examples to rekindle in us the flame of liberty. The example of our own ancestors is abundantly sufficient to maintain the spirit of freedom in its full vigour, and to qualify it in all its exertions. The example of a wise, moral, well-natured, and well-tempered spirit of freedom, is that alone which can be useful to us, or in the least degree reputable or safe. Our fabric is so constituted; one part of it bears so much on the other, the parts, are so made for one another, and for nothing else, that to introduce any foreign matter into it, is to destroy it."

"Their principles always go to the extreme. They who go with the principles of the ancient Whigs, which are those contained in Mr. Burke's book, never can go too far. ... The opinions maintained in that book never can lead to an extreme, because their foundation is laid in an opposition to extremes."