Edmund Burke Quotes

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

It is known that the taste--whatever it is--is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.

The yielding of the weak is the concession to fear.

Pleasure of every kind quickly satisfies.

Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

The tribunal of conscience exists independent of edicts and decrees.

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

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.

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

Evil succeeds when good men do nothing

Humanity cannot be degraded by humiliation.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm.

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.

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

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.

Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

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

No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.

Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in almost every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself, more or less, with all our pleasures.

It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.

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

Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because, of all enemies, it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.

The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous excess, a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all States.

Laws are commanded to hold their tongues among arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

There is a time when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw reverence nor obtain protection.

The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.

Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.

Crimes lead into one another. They who are capable of being forgers, are capable of being incendiaries.

I do ride contend against the advantages of distrust. In the world we live in, it is but too necessary. Some of old called it the very sinews of discretion.

To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.

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

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

That cardinal virtue, temperance.

Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

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

Contempt is not a thing to be despised.

No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

The introduction of Christianity, which, under whatever form, always confers such inestimable benefits on mankind, soon made a sensible change in these rude and fierce manners.

Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.

The pride of men will not often suffer reason to have scope until it can be no longer of service.