Edmund Burke Quotes

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

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

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

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

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

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.

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

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

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

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.

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

Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.

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

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

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.

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.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

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

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

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

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.

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

All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

You can never plan the future by the past.

Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

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

Good order is the foundation of all things.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

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

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

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

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

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.

I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tomb of the Capulets.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Next to love, Sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.

Education is the cheap defense of nations.