Quotes from Edmund Burke

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Kings will be tyrants by policy when subjects are rebels from principle.

I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.

An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

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

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

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

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

There is a time when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw reverence nor obtain protection.

Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

The grand instructor, time.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

To innovate is not to reform.