Edmund Burke Quotes
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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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One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
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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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The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
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No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
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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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All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.
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Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.
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An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
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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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Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
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Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.
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There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
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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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To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
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The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.
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Illustrious predecessor.
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A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.
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To innovate is not to reform.
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When Croft's 'Life of Dr. Young' was spoken of as a good imitation of Dr. Johnson's style, 'No, no,' said he, 'it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration.'
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Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.
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What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.
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Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.