Philosophers From Ireland

"Beauty is the promise of happiness."

"If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

"If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue."

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

"Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling — it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel."

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."

"Mr. Macknight, who is himself chiefly known as a pamphleteer, has given most prominence to Burke's political writings, and has scarcely done justice to his most remarkable literary production, the Abridgment of English History. The most learned of all the writers on the same subject, Lappenberg, says, speaking of this book, that if Burke had devoted himself continuously to historical pursuits, England might have possessed a history worthy to rank with the masterpieces of the Attic and the Tuscan historians. If we may believe the story that Burke desisted from the undertaking because Hume had taken up the same subject, it must ever be regretted that the reverse did not occur, and that the philosopher did not give way to the politician. We should certainly have had a much better History of England; for there is very little doubt that as Burke was our greatest statesman, so he would have been the first of our historians. In that part of the work which he completed, he speaks of mediaeval institutions with an intelligence and appreciation which in his time were almost equally rare among Catholics, Protestants, and infidels... At the age of thirty, Burke proved himself superior to that system of prejudice and ignorance which was then universal, and which is not yet completely dissipated."

"As for politics I leave you as my legacy the request that you will read Burke's speeches from 1790 to 1795. They are the law and the prophets."

"You can hardly imagine what Burke is for all of us who think about politics, and are not wrapped in the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau. Systems of scientific thought have been built up by famous scholars on the fragments that fell from his table. Great literary fortunes have been made by men who traded on the hundredth part of him. Brougham and Lowe lived by the vitality of his ideas. Mackintosh and Macaulay are only Burke trimmed and stripped of all that touched the skies. Montalembert, borrowing a hint from Dollinger, says that Burke and Shakespeare were the two greatest Englishmen."

"I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone better in speaking."

"It is the fashion to treat Burke's writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was bounded, and his observation therefore at fault; but on the whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth."

"Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought; it is his accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could float even an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English Toryism is apt to enter;—the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits."

"Mr. Burke talked in very high terms of Dr. Adam Smith; praised the clearness and depth of his understanding, his profound and extensive learning, and the vast accession that had accrued to British literature and philosophy from these exertions, and described his heart as being equally good with his head and his manners as peculiarly pleasing. Mr. Smith, he said, told him, after they had conversed on subjects of political economy, that he was the only man, who, without communication, thought on these topics exactly as he did."

"Burke was not antirevolutionary per se: he defended a people's right to revolution, albeit as a last resort, when possibilities were exhausted and reformation circumvented... Burke was, throughout his life, a consistent opponent of oppression in multitudinous forms, and he was a consistent defender of the oppressed... His generosity toward the poor is still proverbial in Beaconsfield, where an anecdote still circulates about his cook's complaint that Burke had given the evening meal (a side of beef) to a hungry man. In England, he defended the right of religious dissenters to practice their own religion privately (not, however, those he believed were trying to subvert the English constitution), and he defended homosexuals from social persecution (they could be prosecuted and pilloried). In addition, he...drew up a plan for the eventual abolition of the slave trade... He also supported the Americans in their remonstrances against exorbitant British interference...and he opposed Protestant oppression of Catholics in Ireland and the exploitation of the people of India by the East India Company. None of these was a popular position identified with the status quo; in fact, if Burke had not opposed the French Revolution, he would likely be remembered as "progressive"."

"In Burke's thinking, the hierarchic links lead man from his "littlest platoon"—his family and place in his community—to his larger place in his country, uniting him with the connecting links of European civilization and ultimately with the Logos. He believed that attachment to our littlest platoon connects us to larger battalions of existence, uniting us with all that makes us fully human."

"Burke insists throughout his antirevolutionary works that the Revolution is unprecedented in its oppressive scope, its militarization of society, and its hostile, interventionist nature... He describes the nationalization of the country into a war economy, the state's intrusive regimentation of individual life, and its promotion of an "armed doctrine"—a hostile, alien ideology that propels invading Jacobin armies into Europe's Christian commonwealths. Whether Burke was right or wrong, whether he was prescient, lucky, or an inspired exaggerator, his analyses of revolutionary France approximate what is suggested by the adjective "totalitarian"."

"For Burke, conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical and practical-political weapon, not a set of principles. Burke is, I think, best understood as and is useful and worth reading precisely because he is not Oakeshott: Burke is Whig measures in Tory guise."

"For nearly the whole period during which he survived the commencement of the revolution,—for five of those seven years,—all his predictions, save one momentary expression, had been more than fulfilled: anarchy and bloodshed had borne sway in France; conquest and convulsion had desolated Europe... The providence of mortals is not often able to penetrate so far as this into futurity."

"He looked, indeed, as if he had no wish but to diffuse philanthropy, pleasure, and genial gaiety all around. His figure, when he is not negligent in his carriage, is noble; his air, commanding; his address, graceful; his voice clear, penetrating, sonorous, and powerful; his language, copious, eloquent, and changefully impressive; his manners are attractive; his conversation is past all praise!"

"I own myself entirely of Mrs. Montagu's opinion about Mr. Burke's book; it is the noblest, deepest, most animated, and exalted work that I think I have ever read."

"Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the first classic of the counter-revolution, is among other things a polemic against intellectuals: it claims that it is presumptuous for individuals to seek through reason to challenge the state, a mystic organism symbolised by the domestic hearth as well as the throne and the altar. The radical intellectual becomes a bogey-man... The Burkean positives are family affections and loyalties, hearth and home; hence, by extension, the greater family made by the nation, a hierarchy with the king at its head; and continuity with the past, especially with the inherited creed which it is the Church's business to preserve. Against this imaginative concept of an organic nation, Burke is able to depict as puny and unwholesome the intellectuals, French and English, who want to change the fabric or body of the state: he is in effect anti-individualist and anti-rationalist."

"[I]t was Edmund Burke who—having recovered contact with the historical achievements of Restoration England—exerted the presiding influence over the historical movement of the nineteenth century."

"From first to last he [Lord Acton] seems to have recognised that, behind this whole aspect of the historical movement, there stands the figure of Edmund Burke; and if, in his youth he found Burke the ideal political teacher (especially for a Catholic) and the ideal expositor of the British constitution, he was equally prepared to say that "he would have been the first of our historians". The student of the history of historiography who reads Burke's early work entitled The Abridgement of English History can hardly fail to realise the significance it possesses in view of its place in the chronological series; and it is doubtful whether the student of the general thought of Burke has paid sufficient attention to this work, when one considers to what a degree the historical views which it embodies must actually entail the characteristic features of the man's political outlook."

"Burke's last works and words [are] still the manual of my politics."

"Mr. Burke—no mean authority—published a book on the French Revolution, almost every sentence of which, however canvassed and disputed at the time, has been justified by the course of subsequent events; and almost every prophecy has been strictly fulfilled."

"At least five separate rebellions against authority can be cited as meeting with Burke’s specific approval—the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American War of Independence, the struggle of the Corsicans for freedom, the attempt of the Poles to preserve their national independence, and the various revolts against the minions of Warren Hastings in India. There are certain features common to all these. Each was the rising of practically a whole community under the leadership of its governing classes in defence of what were claimed to be ancient liberties against violent innovation, and no approval of revolution in other circumstances should be read into them. Even so, if there is any general theory behind these instances, we are a long way on the road to a theory of national self-determination."

"Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer."

"Burke's writings in the 1790s were an attack, made before they had prevailed, on almost all the assumptions that dominate public discussion in the modern world. The attack was made from mixed motives in a political context but is not for that reason less useful in demonstrating that what has been held up for conservation by even the most Conservative of thinkers since Burke has been the Jacobinism that Burke attacked, and that Burke's importance for present purposes lies not in his counter-revolutionary politics but in the fact that it was he who made the most striking statement of the religious problem... [I]n defending the ancien régime he was led into affirming of Christianity what he had affirmed of religion in writing A Vindication of Natural Society, of Roman Catholicism in writing about Ireland and of Islam and Hinduism in writing about India – that it was crucial to it. Having come to demand a British effort to re-establish Christianity in France, he so far transcended Anglican assumptions as to make Pitt's central duty the use of force to ensure its re-establishment in Europe."

"Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in the college of the pontiffs for above a century."

"...no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Center of Europe."

"I am attached to Christianity at large; much from conviction; more from affection."

"I have been baptised and educated in the Church of England; and have seen no cause to abandon that communion. ... I think that Church harmonises with our civil constitution, with the frame and fashion of our Society, and with the general Temper of the people. I think it is better calculated, all circumstances considered, for keeping peace amongst the different sects, and of affording to them a reasonable protection, than any other System. Being something in a middle, it is better disposed to moderate."

"I hate tyranny, at least I think I do; but I hate it most of all where most are concerned in it. The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny. If, as society is constituted in these large countries of France and England, full of unequal property, I must make my choice (which God avert!) between the despotism of a single person, or of the many, my election is made. As much injustice and tyranny has been practised in a few months by a French democracy, as in all the arbitrary monarchies in Europe in the forty years of my observation."

"It is not calling the landed estates, possessed by old prescriptive rights, the 'accumulations of ignorance and superstition', that can support me in shaking that grand title, which supersedes all other title, and which all my studies of general jurisprudence have taught me to consider as one principal cause of the formation of states; I mean the ascertaining and securing prescription. But these are donations made in 'ages of ignorance and superstition'. Be it so. It proves that these donations were made long ago; and this is prescription; and this gives right and title."

"I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 1774 and the contrast between that brilliancy, Splendour, and beauty, with the prostrate Homage of a Nation to her, compared with the abominable Scene of 1789 which I was describing did draw Tears from me and wetted my Paper. These Tears came again into my Eyes almost as often as I lookd at the description. They may again. You do not believe this fact, or that these are my real feelings, but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, 'downright Foppery'. My friend, I tell you it is truth—and that it is true, and will be true, when you and I are no more, and will exist as long as men—with their Natural feelings exist."

"It was the case of common soldiers deserting from their officers, to join a furious, licentious populace. It was a desertion to a cause, the real object of which was to level all those institutions, and to break all those connexions, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents. That this cause of theirs was not an enemy to servitude, but to society."

"They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school; but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and pedantic in them; as by their name and authority they systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people. By this mad declaration they subverted the state; and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has ever been known to suffer, and which may in the end produce such a war, and perhaps, many such."

"In the last age, we were in danger of being entangled by the example of France in the net of a relentless despotism. It is not necessary to say any thing upon that example; it exists no longer. Our present danger from the example of a people, whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy. On the side of religion, the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from atheism; a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, and almost avowed."

"Since the House had been prorogued in the summer, much work was done in France. The French had shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time, they had completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures."

"There was an ancient Roman lawyer, of great fame in the history of Roman jurisprudence, whom they called Cui Bono, from his having first introduced into judicial proceedings the argument, "What end or object could the party have had in the act with which he is accused.""

"On one side, your lordships have the prisoner declaring that the people have no laws, no rights, no usages, no distinctions of rank, no sense of honor, no property; in short that they are nothing but a herd of slaves to be governed by the arbitrary will of a master. On the other side, we assert that the direct contrary of this is true. And to prove our assertion we have referred you to the institutes of Ghinges Khân and of Tamerlane: we have referred you to the Mahomedan law, which is binding upon all, from the crowned head to the meanest subject; a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned, and most enlightened jurisprudence that perhaps ever existed in the world. We have shown you, that if these parties are to be compared together, it is not the rights of the people which are nothing, but rather the rights of the sovereign which are so. The rights of the people are every thing, as they ought to be in the true and natural order of things."

"There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations."

"They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance."

"Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old."

"Corrupt influence, which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; which loads us, more than millions of debt; which takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution."

"Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits."

"Never wholly separate in your Mind the merits of any Political Question from the Men who are concerned in it."

"You have theories enough concerning the Rights of Men. It may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their Nature and disposition."

"Your settlement may be at hand; But that it is still at some distance is more likely. The French may be yet to go through more transmigrations. They may pass, as one of our Poets says, “thro' many varieties of untried being,” before their State obtains its final form."

"You may have made a Revolution, but not a Reformation. You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom."