Edmund Burke Quotes

339 Sourced Quotes

The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.

Edmund Burke
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.

Edmund Burke
Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations.

Edmund Burke
Water, when simple is insipid, inodorous, colorless, and smooth; it is found, when not cold, to be a great resolver of spasms, and lubricator of the fibers; this power it probably owes to its smoothness.

Edmund Burke
There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well-protected pursuit.

Edmund Burke
In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters,--that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. This it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations.

Edmund Burke
I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations.

Edmund Burke
For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.

Edmund Burke
Men want to be reminded, who do not want to be taught; because those original ideas of rectitude to which the mind is compelled to assent when they are proposed, are not always as present to us as they ought to be.

Edmund Burke
An appearance of delicacy, and even fragility, is almost essential to beauty.

Edmund Burke
Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.

Edmund Burke
That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.

Edmund Burke
Though men err in assigning the causes of natural operations, the works of nature are by this means under their consideration.

Edmund Burke
Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough (and for a worthy man perhaps too much) to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostasy.

Edmund Burke
The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.

Edmund Burke
Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.

Edmund Burke
The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Edmund Burke
Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.

Edmund Burke
The introduction of Christianity, which, under whatever form, always confers such inestimable benefits on mankind, soon made a sensible change in these rude and fierce manners.

Edmund Burke
Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.

Edmund Burke
The pride of men will not often suffer reason to have scope until it can be no longer of service.

Edmund Burke
Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage.

Edmund Burke
In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered.

Edmund Burke
Nothing tends so much to the corruption of science as to suffer it to stagnate: these waters must! if troubled before they can exert their virtues.

Edmund Burke
Sallust is indisputably one of the best historians among the Romans, both for the purity of his language and the elegance of his style.

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

Edmund Burke
Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.

Edmund Burke
Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man.

Edmund Burke
To be struck with His power, it is only necessary to open our eyes.

Edmund Burke
In general the languages of most unpolished people have a great force and energy of expression; and this is but natural. Uncultivated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distinguishing them; but, for that reason, they admire more, and are more affected with what they see, and therefore express themselves in a warmer and more passionate manner.

Edmund Burke