Edmund Burke Quotes

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

~ Edmund Burke

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. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

All That Is Needed For Evil To Succeeded, Is For Good People To Do Nothing

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his /pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs/, --- and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, --- no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinions.

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

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.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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]

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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 —“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.

~ Edmund Burke

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

~ Edmund Burke

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.

~ Edmund Burke

Custom reconciles us to everything.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

The effect of liberty on individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival.

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke

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

~ Edmund Burke