Quotes from Edmund Burke

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.

Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.

"Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones."

"They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance."

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.

The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

Falsehood has a perennial spring.

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for the moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

The march of the human mind is slow.

Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue.

People never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.