Edmund Burke Quotes
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Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.
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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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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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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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It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
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Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
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Of this stamp is the cant of, Not men, but measures.
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I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets.
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I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.
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The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
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There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.
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The wisdom of our ancestors.
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A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.
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I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
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Boldness formerly was not the character of Atheists as such. ... But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.
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You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.
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Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.
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They talk as if England were not in Europe.
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It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.
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By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.
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I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government.
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Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.
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Whatever is supreme in a state, ought to have, as much as possible, its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it. It ought to give a security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.