The Works of Edmund Burke: With a Memoir

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George Dearborn, 1834 - Great Britain

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Page 489 - 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.
Page 399 - Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction ; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic.
Page 245 - All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences ; we give and take ; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others; and, we chuse rather to be happy citizens, than subtle disputants.
Page 228 - In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth...
Page 187 - When bad men combine, the good must associate ; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Page 481 - 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, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself ; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour.
Page 228 - No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of...
Page 249 - All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us: a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine.
Page 249 - We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire : and have made the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.
Page 399 - Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple.

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