Sir William Cash:

When I wrote about "the role of national parliaments in EC co-operation" in 1989 - this shows I was thinking about these matters even then - I quoted from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. I regard this as a sort of backdrop or kind of theatre. I know it is a long time ago, but this is what he said:

We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality, nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born .... We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds .... with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men.

That was his reply to Thomas Paine.