Edmund Burke Quotes

339 Sourced Quotes

Society is indeed a contract…it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Edmund Burke
Of this stamp is the cant of, Not men, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.

Edmund Burke
Many have been taught to think that moderation, in a case like this, is a sort of treason.

Edmund Burke
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in government are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.

Edmund Burke
You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.

Edmund Burke
In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Edmund Burke
A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.

Edmund Burke
And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

Edmund Burke
It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.

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
God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.

Edmund Burke
Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

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
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
The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

Edmund Burke
By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.

Edmund Burke
I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government.

Edmund Burke
The king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm,—the triple cord, which no man can break.

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

Edmund Burke
It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform..

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

Edmund Burke
Young man, there is America — which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.

Edmund Burke
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.

Edmund Burke
No government ought to own that it exists for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people, or that there is such a principle involved in its policy.

Edmund Burke