Edmund Burke Quotes

339 Sourced Quotes

I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say, that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people.

Edmund Burke
Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.

Edmund Burke
Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. 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 in.

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

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

Edmund Burke
The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of the wisdom of Him who made it.

Edmund Burke
The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man.

Edmund Burke
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

Edmund Burke
Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.

Edmund Burke
To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

Edmund Burke
Man is by his constitution a religious animal; atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts.

Edmund Burke
A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.

Edmund Burke
By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

Edmund Burke
Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.

Edmund Burke