The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, Volume 6

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Little, Brown,, 1877 - Great Britain

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Page 368 - All the principal religions in Europe stand upon one common bottom. The support that the whole or the favored parts may have in the secret dispensations of Providence it is impossible to tell ; but, humanly speaking, they are all prescriptive religions. They have all stood long enough to make prescription and its chain of legitimate prejudices their main stay. The people who compose the four...
Page 322 - VI. 21 should be themselves the chief sufferers by it; because it would be made against the principle of a superior law, which it is not in the power of any community, or of the whole race of man, to alter...
Page 194 - Public troubles have often called upon this country to look into its Constitution. It has ever been bettered by such a revision. If our happy and luxuriant increase of dominion, and our diffused population, have outgrown the limits of a Constitution made for a contracted object...
Page 345 - THE Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion, as are consistent with the laws of Ireland ; or as they did enjoy in the reign of King Charles...
Page 211 - ... exclusively to the tomb — the natural and only period of human inconstancy, with regard either to desert or to opinion : for they are the very same hands which erect that very frequently (and sometimes with reason enough) pluck down the statue. Had such an unmerited and...
Page 379 - ... strength, which, to that hour, Ireland was never so happy as to enjoy. My sanguine hopes are blasted, and I must consign my feelings, on that terrible disappointment, to the same patience in which I have been obliged to bury the vexation I suffered on the defeat of the other great, just, and honorable causes in which I have had some share ; and which have given more of dignity, than of peace and advantage, to a long laborious life.
Page 428 - Poor souls, they are to be pitied, who think of nothing but dangers long passed by, and but little of the perils that actually surround them. I have been long, but it is almost a necessary consequence of dictating, and that by snatches, as a relief from pain gives me the means of expressing my sentiments. They can have little weight, as coming from me ; and I have not power enough of mind or body to bring them out with their natural force. But I do not wish to have it concealed that I am of the same...
Page 261 - But all this is merely mechanical, and what a couple of days' application would set to rights. I have seen what has been done by the West Indian Assemblies. It is arrant trifling. They have done little ; and what they have done is good for nothing, — for it is totally destitute of an executory principle.
Page 147 - People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws ; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous, more or less.
Page 346 - ... provided also, that no person whatsoever shall have or enjoy the benefit of this article, that shall neglect or refuse to take the oath of allegiance, made by act of parliament in England, in the first year of the reign of their present majesties, when thereunto required.

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