Edmund Burke quotes:

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But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
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.
A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
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.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.
He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.
Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.
Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.
Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
The march of the human mind is slow.
All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.
To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
The traveller has reached the end of the journey!
Good order is the foundation of all things.
Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
You can never plan the future by the past.
A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.
Society is indeed a contract it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)]
I cannot help concurring with the opinion that an absolute democracy, no more than absolute monarchy, is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government.
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous excess, a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all States.
To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.
It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
All government is founded on compromise and banter.
He only deserves to be remembered by posterity who treasures up and preserves the history of his ancestors.
The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought that never wanders, the purpose that never wavers - these are the masters of victory.
There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation.You choose a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, heisnotthe Member for Bristol, but heisa Member of Parliament.
Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn.
Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.
It is in the relaxation of security; it is in the expansion of prosperity; it is in the hour of dilatation of the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure, that the real character of men is discerned.
I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.
Circumspection and caution are part of wisdom.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.
It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.
The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.
People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.
Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
I do ride contend against the advantages of distrust. In the world we live in, it is but too necessary. Some of old called it the very sinews of discretion.
A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man.
Dogs are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute creation...
All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
A great empire and little minds go ill together.
Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.
Not men but measures a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.
The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candor of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds.
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate.
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Falsehood is a perennial spring.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.
True humility-the basis of the Christian system-is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.
Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.
Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.
I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded....We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
I own that there is a haughtiness and fierceness in human nature which will cause innumerable broils, place men in what situation you please.
My good friends, while I do most earnestly recommend you to take care of your health and safety, as things most precious to us, I would not have that care degenerate into an effeminate and over-curious attention, which is always disgraceful to a man's self, and often troublesome to others.
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.
Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.
Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.
A populace never rebels from passion for attack, but from impatience of suffering.
By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.
I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.
The greatest crimes do not arise from a want of feeling for others but from an over-sensibilit y for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires
A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.
In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.
The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.
Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves.
There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed upon. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.
To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.
Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.
Turn over a new leaf.
Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.
The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best.

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