Edmund Burke Quotes (222 Quotes)

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.

If the grain were separated from the chaff, which fills the works of our national poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in the proportion of a molehill to a mountain

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.

The mysterious virtue of wax and parchment.

These gentle historians, on the contrary, dip their pens in nothing but the milk of human kindness.

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.

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.

That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

Make the revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.

She is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one

Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.

You cannot plan the future by the past.

Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting

I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.

The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.

Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity

Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions any bungler can add to the old but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them.

You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.

There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.

The march of the human mind is slow.

The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and leading in England.

That the greatest security of the people, against the encroachments and usurpations of their superiors, is to keep the Spirit of Liberty constantly awake, is an undeniable truth

Contempt is not a thing to be despised.

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.

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.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray, to not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field that, of course, they are many in number or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.