Edmund Burke

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray, to not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity-the law of nature, and of nations.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

Those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies some description must be uppermost. The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.