Edmund Burke
Conservatism
« Penchant à conserver, talent d'améliorer : voilà les deux qualités qui me feraient juger de la bonté d'un homme d'État. »
Burke disliked the enlightenment and the philosophes who preached it. He once advised a French friend that, "It were better to forget once and for all, the Encyclopédie and the whole body of Economists and to revert to those old rules and principles which have hitherto made princes great and nations happy."
- Edmund Burke, to Chevalier Claude-Francois de Rivarol, 1 june 1791, Correspondence, vi, 267-8
"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.
The age of chivalry is gone. - That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold a generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, achieved defensive nations, the nurse of the manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Revolution
"It shews the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event, to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions."
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
« Un État qui n'a pas les moyens d'effectuer des changements n'a pas les moyens de se maintenir. »
Reason
« Au cours de ma vie j'ai connu des grands hommes et j'ai collaboré avec eux dans la mesure de mes moyens ; mais je n'ai jamais connu de plan qui n'ait été modifié grâce aux observations de gens dont l'intelligence était cependant bien inférieur à celle de l'homme qui en avait été l'initiateur. »
Miscellaneous
« Ne cédez jamais au désespoir, mais, si cela devait vous arriver, luttez avec l'énergie du désespoir. »