Edmund Burke - True Quotes

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Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

Edmund Burke
In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.

Edmund Burke
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.

Edmund Burke
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.

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

Edmund Burke
True humility-the basis of the Christian system-is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.

Edmund Burke
Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

Edmund Burke
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
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
In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.

Edmund Burke
Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage.

Edmund Burke
Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man.

Edmund Burke