Edmund Burke Quotes
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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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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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By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
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Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
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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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Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.
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Falsehood is a perennial spring.
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Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
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They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
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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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The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
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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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Custom reconciles us to everything.
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Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
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Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
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The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
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The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
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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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Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
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All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.
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Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.
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No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.
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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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Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.