Edmund Burke Quotes
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A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
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Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
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There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and, what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.
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Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
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Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
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Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
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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.
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All protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
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If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
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Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
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Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
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Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
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Beauty is the promise of happiness.
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Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
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If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.
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The march of the human mind is slow.
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They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
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But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
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Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
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When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
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To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
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The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
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Falsehood is a perennial spring.
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Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.