Edmund Burke Quotes

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the substance of original justice.

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

Gambling is a principle inherent in human nature.

Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever

To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man.

In all forms of government the people is the true legislator.

Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.

Hypocrisy is no cheap vice; nor can our natural temper be masked for many years together.

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.

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?

But whoever is a genuine follower of Truth, keeps his eye steady upon his guide, indifferent whither he is led, provided that she is the leader.

The perfection of conversation is not to play a regular sonata, but, like the AEolian harp, to await the inspiration of the passing breeze.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.

You will not think it unnatural that those who have an object depending, which strongly engages their hopes and fears, should be somewhat inclining to superstition.

Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles.

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.

The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.

The only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar minds - success.

A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.

The grave is a common treasury, to which we must all be taken.

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

The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

General rebellions and revolts of a whole people never were encouraged now or at any time. They are always provoked.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding.

The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Dangers by being despised grow great.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.

There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.

Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.

Power, in whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly.

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!

You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.

Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm.

A jealous lover lights his torch from the firebrand of the fiend.

Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.