Edmund Burke Quotes

What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words.

The writers against religion whilst they oppose every system are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.

The effect of liberty on individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.

No passion so effectively robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.