Notable Quote - Edmund Burke - Granite Grok

Notable Quote – Edmund Burke

One of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and its laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation–and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers.  By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken.  No one generation could link with another. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

 

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