Quotes by Edmund Burke
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Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.

If any ask me what a free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so,and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.

Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.

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.

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.

I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .

Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order.

When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment, we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port to steer.

The marketplace obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success.

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.

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.

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

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.

Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.

The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.

Between craft and credulity, the voice of reason is stifled.

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

The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements-success.

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

We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt.

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

Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

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

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

A great empire and little minds go ill together.

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.

For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.

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

Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations.

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

In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered.

There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.

When you find me attempting to break into your house to take your plate, under any pretence whatsoever, but most of all under pretence of purity of religion and Christian charity shoot me for a robber and a hypocrite, as in that case I shall certainly be.

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

The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality.

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded.

It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.

The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.

Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils.

For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever.

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable.

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

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but in selection.

Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

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.

Those who have been intoxicated with power... can never willingly abandon it.

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

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.

The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.

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.

I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.

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

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.

We begin our public affection in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.

The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.

It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.

Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it's yellow.

Not men but measures a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

The ocean is an object of no small terror.

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.

Curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied, and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety.

The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.

As to great and commanding talents, they are the gift of Providence in some way unknown to us, they rise where they are least expected; they fail when everything seems disposed to produce them, or at least to call them forth.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.

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

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.

Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.

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

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

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

It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

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

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.