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  ...to whom the name of king is still venerable. They calculate the duration of that sentiment; and when they find it nearly expiring, they will not trouble themselves with excuses for extinguishing the name, as they have the thing. They used it as a sort of navel-string to nourish their unnatural offspring from the bowels of royalty itself. Now that the monster can purvey for its own subsistence, it will only carry the mark about it, as a token of its having torn the womb it came from. Tyrants seldom want pretexts.   Fraud is the ready minister of injustice; and whilst the currency of false pretence and sophistic reasoning was expedient to their designs, they were under no necessity of drawing upon me to furnish them with that coin. But pretexts and sophisms have had their day, and have done their work. The usurpation no longer seeks plausibility: it trusts to power.
Nothing that I can say, or that you can say, will hasten them, by a single hour, in the execution of a design which they have long...   Burke, Edmund

Excerpt from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12) · This quote is about tyranny · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.

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