Edmund Burke Quotes

War never leaves where it found a nation.

You cannot plan the future by the past.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

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 that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.

Queen of arts and daughter of heaven.

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

The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

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

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

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

I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.

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

We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.

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.

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

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.

The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

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

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (1794)]

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.

But 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. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.

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

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

The writers against religion whilst they oppose every system are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

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

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

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

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

Never despair but if you do work on in despair.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

What shadows we are what shadows we pursue!

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.

You can never plan the future by the past.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Adversity is a severe instructor. ... He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

A representative owes not just his industry but his judgement

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

An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.

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

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

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]

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

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

The wisdom of our ancestors.

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 which may be soon turned into complaints.