Edmund Burke - Government Quotes

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Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

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
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
The parties are the gamesters; but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the winner in the end.

Edmund Burke
All who have ever written on government are unanimous, that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Edmund Burke
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
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
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
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

Edmund Burke
All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act — is founded on compromise and barter.

Edmund Burke
It is the love of the [British] people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

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
I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be.

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

Edmund Burke
In all forms of Government the people is the true legislator.

Edmund Burke
If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, — and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.

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
To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.

Edmund Burke
If ever there was in all the proceedings of government a rule that is fundamental, universal, invariable it is this: that you ought never to attempt a measure of authority you are not morally sure you can go through with.

Edmund Burke