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Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.
Edmund Burke
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Many have been taught to think that moderation, in a case like this, is a sort of treason.
Edmund Burke
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It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.
Edmund Burke
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It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact; and great trade will always be attended with considerable abuses.
Edmund Burke
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People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those, who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous, more or less.
Edmund Burke
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Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke
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Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke
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Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.
Edmund Burke
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I was persuaded that government was a practical thing made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians.
Edmund Burke
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No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke
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Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.
Edmund Burke
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Every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces; and to join compliance with reason.
Edmund Burke
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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
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Of the younger Pitt's maiden speech:
Not merely a chip of the old 'block', but the old block itself.
Edmund Burke
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Continue to instruct the world; and - whilst we carry on a poor unequal conflict with the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons than other passions and prejudices of our own - convey wisdom to future generations.
Edmund Burke
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It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.
Edmund Burke
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A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.
Edmund Burke
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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
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So to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen.
Edmund Burke
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Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
Edmund Burke
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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
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The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men to each govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.
Edmund Burke
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The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
Edmund Burke
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The science of constructing a commonwealth or renovating it, or reforming it, is...not to be taught a priori...That which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may rise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens; and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.
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Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.
Edmund Burke
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Edmund Burke
Creative Commons
Born:
January 12, 1729
Died:
July 9, 1797
(aged 68)
Bio:
Edmund Burke was an Irish statesman born in Dublin, as well as an author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to London, served as a Member of Parliament for many years in the House of Commons with the Whig Party.
Known for:
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
A Vindication of Natural Society
The portable Edmund Burke
An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)
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