The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volumen3

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John West and O.C. Greenleaf, 1807

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Página 104 - We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
Página 184 - He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.
Página 93 - It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Página 63 - To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.
Página 51 - In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.
Página 79 - The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.
Página 77 - Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the ' • * individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their...
Página 82 - I have lived to it, and I could almost say, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error — I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it ; I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible...
Página 29 - Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politicks but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities...
Página 94 - All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

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