Edmund Burke - Men Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

View all Edmund Burke Quotes
Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations — wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

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
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
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
Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.

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
The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.

Edmund Burke
Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.

Edmund Burke
By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

Edmund Burke
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Edmund Burke
Though men err in assigning the causes of natural operations, the works of nature are by this means under their consideration.

Edmund Burke
Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.

Edmund Burke
There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.

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
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke
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
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
Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order.

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 men of England — the men, I mean of light and leading in England.

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

Edmund Burke
It shews the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event, to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

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
We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt.

Edmund Burke
In no country perhaps in the world is law so general a study [as in America].... This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources.... They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

Edmund Burke