Edmund Burke - Human Quotes

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A good parson once said that where mystery begins religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins, justice ends?

Edmund Burke
The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.

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
Through a wise and salutary neglect [of the colonies], a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

Edmund Burke
The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of the wisdom of Him who made it.

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

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
By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.

Edmund Burke
All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

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
Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.

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
There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed upon. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.

Edmund Burke