Quotes from Edmund Burke

The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

He only deserves to be remembered by posterity who treasures up and preserves the history of his ancestors.

History is a pact between the dead the living and the yet unborn.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.

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

The most favourable laws can do very little towards the happiness of people when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them.

Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

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.

As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.

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

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.

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

The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold the generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone!

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.

A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.