Edmund Burke Quotes
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It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
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To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.
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The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
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All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
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I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
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They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man.
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Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
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Good order is the foundation of all things.
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I decline the election. - It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.
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Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to any thing but power for their relief.
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So to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen.
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It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
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The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
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The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.
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Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
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In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.
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Nothing less will content me, than whole America.
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If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, - and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.
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So far as it has gone, it probably is the most pure and defecated publick good which ever has been conferred on mankind.
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It shews the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event, to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
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Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
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Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.
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Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.
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And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.