Edmund Burke Quotes
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We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
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By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
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Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.
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The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
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Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
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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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When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
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Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
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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.
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Falsehood is a perennial spring.
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They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
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Custom reconciles us to everything.
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The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
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Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
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The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
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Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
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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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The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
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Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
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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.
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The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
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Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.
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People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.
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Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.