Top 498 Quotes & Sayings by Edmund Burke - Page 3

All the forces of darkness need to succeed ... is for the people to do nothing.

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

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, to 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, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

A great empire and little minds go ill together.

It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor.

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

In a democracy the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority...and that oppression of the majority will extend to far great number, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. Under a cruel prince they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation: they seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort.

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.

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

You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.

Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage.

All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.

Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue.

In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

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

Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty.

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 great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.

A populace never rebels from passion for attack, but from impatience of suffering.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

Those who attempt to level never equalize

That the greatest security of the people, against the encroachments and usurpations of their superiors, is to keep the Spirit of Liberty constantly awake, is an undeniable truth

The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.

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

To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.

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.

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

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

Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles.

A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

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

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.

Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.

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.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

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

Dogs are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute creation.

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.

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

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

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Equity money is dynamic and debt money is static.

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.

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

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

My good friends, while I do most earnestly recommend you to take care of your health and safety, as things most precious to us, I would not have that care degenerate into an effeminate and over-curious attention, which is always disgraceful to a man's self, and often troublesome to others.

When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.

Religion, to have any force upon men's understandings,--indeed, to exist at all,--must be supposed paramount to law, and independent for its substance upon any human institution, else it would be the absurdest thing in the world,--an acknowledged cheat.

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.