Edmund Burke Quotes

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

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

Always steady in the rejection of a Reform of Parliam[en]t which proved the best sense, & better than some sense they were deficient in at Times.

When such a complete convulsion has shaken the State, and hardly left any thing whatsoever, either in civil arrangements, or in the Characters and disposition of men's minds, exactly where it was, whatever shall be settled although in the former persons and upon old forms, will be in some measure a new thing and will labour under something of the weakness as well as other inconveniences of a Change. My poor opinion is that you mean to establish what you call 'L'ancien Régime,' If any one means that system of Court Intrigue miscalled a Government as it stood, at Versailles before the present confusions as the thing to be established, that I believe will be found absolutely impossible; and if you consider the Nature, as well of persons, as of affairs, I flatter myself you must be of my opinion. That was tho' not so violent a State of Anarchy as well as the present. If it were even possible to lay things down exactly as they stood, before the series of experimental politicks began, I am quite sure that they could not long continue in that situation. In one Sense of L'Ancien Régime I am clear that nothing else can reasonably be done.

This day I heard from Laurence who has sent me papers confirming the portentous State of France—where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be producd in the place of it—where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable.

A História consiste, em sua maior parte, das misérias trazidas ao mundo por orgulho, ambição, avareza, vingança, luxúria, sedição, hipocrisia, zelo desgovernado e toda a linha de apetites desordenados que abalam a vida pública com as mesmas

[...] agitadas tempestades que sacodem
A vida privada, e tornam a existência amarga.

Esses vícios são as causas dessas tempestades. A religião, a moral, as leis, as prerrogativas, os privilégios, as liberdades, os direitos dos homens são os pretextos. Os pretextos sempre aparecem com alguma aparência ilusória de um bem real. Você não preservaria os homens da tirania e da sedição ao extirpar da mente os princípios aos quais estes pretextos fraudulentos se aplicam?

"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

Few things discover the state of the arts amongst people more certainly than the presents that are made to them by foreigners.

I never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary: it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling — it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.

Falsehood has a perennial spring.

My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed. To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.

The only thing necessary for the continuance of evil is for a good man to do nothing.

The state of civil society, which necessarily generates this aristocracy, is a state of nature; and much more truly so than a savage and incoherent mode of life. For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated, and most predominates. Art is man’s nature. We are as much, at least, in a state of nature in formed manhood, as in immature and helpless infancy.