Edmund Burke Quotes

It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.

All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

And having looked to government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them. To avoid that evil, government will redouble the causes of it; and then it will become inveterate and incurable.

Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.

The only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements—success.

We begin our public affection in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

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

Man is by his constitution a religious animal; atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts.

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! it is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

The age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself ; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combination of skill and force, can do in his favour.

Those who attempt to level never equalize.

Whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

He was not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.

Individuals pass like shadows, but the Commonwealth is fixed and stable.

People crushed by law have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those, who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous, more or less.

If any man ask me what a free government is, I answer that for any practical purpose, it is what the people think it so.