Edmund Burke Quotes

339 Sourced Quotes

Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.

Edmund Burke
Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty.

Edmund Burke
Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the character of the age.

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
Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.

Edmund Burke
Hypocrisy is no cheap vice; nor can our natural temper be masked for many years together.

Edmund Burke
Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity.

Edmund Burke
I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.

Edmund Burke
There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects and terrible; the latter on small ones and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us: in one case we are forced, in the other, we are flattered, into compliance.

Edmund Burke
If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence in some circumstances, in others prudence of a higher order may justify us in speaking our thoughts.

Edmund Burke
My good friends, while I do most earnestly recommend you to take care of your health and safety, as things most precious to us, I would not have that care degenerate into an effeminate and over-curious attention, which is always disgraceful to a man's self, and often troublesome to others.

Edmund Burke
To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.

Edmund Burke
What grander idea can the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious, and fiery globe, hanging in the midst of an infinite space, and surrounded with bodies of whom our earth is scarcely anything in the comparison!

Edmund Burke
Laws are commanded to hold their tongues among arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.

Edmund Burke
I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from an obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Edmund Burke
By looking into physical causes our minds are opened and enlarged; and in this pursuit, whether we take or whether we lose the game, the chase is certainly of service.

Edmund Burke
The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.

Edmund Burke
The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.

Edmund Burke
Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

Edmund Burke
Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.

Edmund Burke
What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.

Edmund Burke
Contempt is not a thing to be despised. It may be borne with a calm and equal mind, but no man, by lifting his head high, can pretend that he does not perceive the scorns that are poured down on him from above.

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
The stomach, the lungs, the liver, as well as other parts, are incomparably well adapted to their purposes; yet they are far from having any beauty.

Edmund Burke
Flattery is no more than what raises in a man's mind an idea of a preference which he has not.

Edmund Burke
He who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; and he who profits by a superior understanding raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior standing he unites with.

Edmund Burke
Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind.

Edmund Burke
Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.

Edmund Burke
Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.

Edmund Burke
All writers on the science of policy are agreed, and they agree with experience, that all governments must frequently infringe the rules of justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity itself to the reigning of interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of state.

Edmund Burke