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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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
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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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People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
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Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.
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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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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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Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.
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One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
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Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.
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Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
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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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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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An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
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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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The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
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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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To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
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The traveller has reached the end of the journey!
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Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.