Edmund Burke - Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

87 Sourced Quotes

View all Edmund Burke Quotes
What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.

Edmund Burke
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

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 objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds.

Edmund Burke
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Edmund Burke
Every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces; and to join compliance with reason.

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

Edmund Burke
Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour.

Edmund Burke
If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

Edmund Burke
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Edmund Burke
I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.

Edmund Burke
Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

Edmund Burke
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.

Edmund Burke
The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

Edmund Burke
Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Edmund Burke
There ought to be system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

Edmund Burke
In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

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
Of Marie-Antoinette:
I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

Edmund Burke
In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.

Edmund Burke
Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit.

Edmund Burke
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.

Edmund Burke
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Edmund Burke
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