Edmund Burke Quotes (222 Quotes)


    All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

    Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science a partnership in all art a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

    The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves

    A nation is not conquered which is perpetually to be conquered.

    Equity money is dynamic and debt money is static.


    There is a courageous wisdom there is also a false reptile prudence, the result, not of caution, but of fear.

    Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

    The marketplace obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success

    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.

    No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

    Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.

    A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.

    In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.

    'War,' says Machiavelli, 'ought to be the only study of a prince' and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. 'He ought,' says this great political doctor, 'to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans. 'A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

    History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.

    It is hard to say whether the doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.

    The yielding of the weak is the concession to fear.

    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.


    Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.

    To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

    It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

    Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations

    Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

    When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

    Our patience will achieve more than our force.

    What is liberty without...virtue It is...madness, without restraint.Men are qualified for liberty in exact proportion to their dispositionto put moral chains upon their own appetites.

    Some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolite

    If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

    To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty

    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 great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.

    A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

    In all forms of government the people is the true legislator

    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.

    Let us only suffer any person to tell us his story morning And evening, but for twelve months, and he will become our master.

    He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

    He was not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.

    I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.

    Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

    Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

    Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

    They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

    My vigour relents, I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

    The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment but it does no remove the necessity of subduing again and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

    What is it we all seek for in an election To answer its real purposes, you must first posses the means of knowing the fitness of your man and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.

    The only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments - success


    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.


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