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A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
Edmund Burke -
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.
Edmund Burke
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Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.
Edmund Burke -
Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
Edmund Burke -
If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
Edmund Burke -
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Edmund Burke -
Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
Edmund Burke -
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.
Edmund Burke
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Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
Edmund Burke -
They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
Edmund Burke -
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Edmund Burke -
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.
Edmund Burke -
Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
Edmund Burke -
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke -
Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.
Edmund Burke -
Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
Edmund Burke -
Falsehood is a perennial spring.
Edmund Burke -
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.
Edmund Burke -
If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke -
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
Edmund Burke -
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
Edmund Burke -
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke