Burke

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Macmillan, 1923 - 220 pages

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Page 84 - The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable ; but whether it is / not your interest to make them happy. It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do ; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.
Page 75 - Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Page 173 - Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason...
Page 75 - But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.
Page 75 - But authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience, these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.
Page 104 - Animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.
Page 38 - Nitor in aJversum" is .the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings, of the people.
Page 165 - Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts ; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race...
Page 8 - He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences, — a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together ; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion.
Page 94 - I never would suffer any man, or description of men, to suffer from errors that naturally have grown out of the abusive constitution of those offices which I propose to regulate. If I cannot reform with equity, I will not reform at all.

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