Edmund Burke Quotes

What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.
Edmund Burke
Never despair but if you do work on in despair.
Edmund Burke
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words.
Edmund Burke
The wisdom of our ancestors.
Edmund Burke
War never leaves where it found a nation.
Edmund Burke
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
Edmund Burke
You cannot plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Edmund Burke
What shadows we are what shadows we pursue!
Edmund Burke
Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.
Edmund Burke
All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
Edmund Burke
By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.
Edmund Burke
A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival.
Edmund Burke
The writers against religion whilst they oppose every system are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Edmund Burke
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke
Dangers by being despised grow great.
Edmund Burke
Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgement and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke
A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together would be my standard of a statesman.
Edmund Burke
Queen of arts and daughter of heaven.
Edmund Burke
There is a courageous wisdom there is also a false reptile prudence the result not of caution but of fear.
Edmund Burke
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
Edmund Burke
By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.
Edmund Burke
A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival.
Edmund Burke
The writers against religion whilst they oppose every system are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Edmund Burke
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke
Dangers by being despised grow great.
Edmund Burke
Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgement and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke
A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together would be my standard of a statesman.
Edmund Burke
Queen of arts and daughter of heaven.
Edmund Burke
There is a courageous wisdom there is also a false reptile prudence the result not of caution but of fear.
Edmund Burke
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
Edmund Burke
By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.
Edmund Burke
The effect of liberty on individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.
Edmund Burke
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
Edmund Burke
We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.
Edmund Burke
History is a pact between the dead the living and the yet unborn.
Edmund Burke
Custom reconciles us to everything.
Edmund Burke
I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tombs of the Capulets.
Edmund Burke
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Edmund Burke
Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke
No passion so effectively robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke
Never despair but if you do work on in despair.
Edmund Burke
All government - indeed every human benefit and enjoyment every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.
Edmund Burke
Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
Edmund Burke
Mere parsimony is not economy . . . expense and great expense may be an essential part of true economy.
Edmund Burke
Adversity is a severe instructor. ... He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke
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 appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.
Edmund Burke
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the
Edmund Burke
The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]
Edmund Burke
A representative owes not just his industry but his judgement
Edmund Burke
It is generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles and design.
Edmund Burke