Edmund Burke Quotes

339 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Edmund Burke
To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.

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

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

Edmund Burke
It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.

Edmund Burke
The very name of a politician, a statesman, is sure to cause terror and hatred; it has always connected with it the ideas of treachery, cruelty, fraud, and tyranny.

Edmund Burke
The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.

Edmund Burke
The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.

Edmund Burke
I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded....We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.

Edmund Burke
They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man.

Edmund Burke
It is in the relaxation of security; it is in the expansion of prosperity; it is in the hour of dilatation of the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure, that the real character of men is discerned.

Edmund Burke
Knowledge of those unalterable Relations which Providence has ordained that every thing should bear to every other...To these we should conform in good Earnest; and not think to force Nature, and the whole Order of her System, by a Compliance with our Pride, and Folly, to conform to our artificial Regulations.

Edmund Burke
A man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to choose his subject properly.... But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain to what would be reason and truth if asserted in China.

Edmund Burke
Religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort.

Edmund Burke
The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice.

Edmund Burke
The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies [synonyms] and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. Things never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes called agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess sometimes too continued an exercise of revolutionary power.

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
It is by bribing, not so often by being bribed, that wicked politicians bring ruin on mankind. Avarice is a rival to the pursuits of many.

Edmund Burke