Edmund Burke Quotes

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.

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

The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.

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.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

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

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.

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

Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

All That Is Needed For Evil To Succeeded, Is For Good People To Do Nothing

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

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

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.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

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.

Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.