Edmund Burke Quotes

Evil prevails when good men fail to act.

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

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

Education is the cheap defense of nations.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.

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

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.

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

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.

The greatest sin is to do nothing because you can only do a little.

I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

True religion is the foundation of society. When that is once shaken by contempt, the whole fabric cannot be stable nor lasting.

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

The superfluities of a rich nation furnish a better object of trade than the necessities of a poor one. It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation.You choose a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, heisnotthe Member for Bristol, but heisa Member of Parliament.

Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.

Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.

Next to love, Sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.

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.

Applaud us when we run, Console us when we fall, Cheer us when we recover.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

He only deserves to be remembered by posterity who treasures up and preserves the history of his ancestors.

We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.

A coward's courage is in his tongue.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director and regulator, the standard of them all.

Never, no never, did Nature say one thing, and wisdom another.

The greatest crimes do not arise from a want of feeling for others but from an over-sensibilit y for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires