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.
~ Edmund Burke
People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.
Good order is the foundation of all things.
Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations.
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Beauty is the promise of happiness.
Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.
There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
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.
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Education is the cheap defense of nations.
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.
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.
You can never plan the future by the past.
