pickIt‘s a dense read, and it really helps to have some background on both the basic outline of the French Revolution and on Burke‘s thought, but Burke‘s open letter is lively, piercingly insightful, prescient, timeless, and eminently quotable. It‘s place in the canon of conservative thought is well deserved, and it is well worth the read even if you seen Burke‘s name around a lot, because there is too much wisdom here to pithily summarize.
It‘s dense reading, but you can‘t say Burke‘s writing isn‘t lively...
“The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system, which they call a constitution, cannot be laid open without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it.”
“Whatever is supreme in a state, ought to have, as much as possible, it‘s judicial authority so constituted as it only not to depend on it, but in some sort to balance it. It ought to give a security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.”
“[A] great difference will immediately strike him, between what policy would dictate on the original introduction of such institutions, and on a question of their total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and deep, and where by long habit things more valuable than themselves are so adapted to them, and in a manner interwoven with them, that the one cannot be destroyed without notably impairing the other.”
#EndOfYearReadingMarathon
“Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.” #EndOfYearReadingMarathon
“It has punished all prelates; which is to favour the vicious, at least in point of reputation.” #EndOfYearReadingMarathon
“I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes.” #EndOfYearReadingMarathon
“I do not pretend to know France as correctly as some others; but I have endeavoured through my whole life to make myself acquainted with human nature; otherwise I should be unfit to take even my humble part in the service of mankind.”
Words to live by.
“A brave people will certainly prefer liberty, accompanied with a virtuous poverty, to a depraved and wealthy servitude. But before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price.”
“Who but a tyrant...could think of seizing on the property of men, unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and thousands together?”
“This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature.”
“These professors, finding their extreme principles not applicable to cases which call only for a qualified, or, as I may say, civil and legal resistance, in such cases employ no resistance at all. It is with them a war or a revolution, or it is nothing.”
“What is the use of discussing a man‘s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring & administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer & the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics”
“I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes.”
"An absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact, or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other."
“No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties.”
"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."
If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right...They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life...Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself
pickHe completely predicted what happened with the French Revolution before it happened. This is my favorite book on the event.
Reflections on the Revolution in France | 
