Edmund Burke Quotes

. . . you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality, which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in a humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep, — to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy, — to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison.

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

Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind; the alliance, therefore, of these writers with the moneyed interest23 had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood

Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.

Quem poderia assegurar que um terno e delicado senso de honra bata com os primeiros impulsos do coração quando nenhum homem sabe qual a regra de honra em uma nação que continuamente varia o padrão da sua moeda? Nenhuma parte da vida reteria suas aquisições. Barbárie no que diz respeito à ciência e literatura, imperícia no que diz respeito às artes e manufaturas, infalivelmente sucederiam à falta de uma educação firme e um princípio resoluto; e assim a própria comunidade, em poucas gerações, desmoronaria, e, finalmente, dispersar-se-ia por todos os ventos dos céus.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same — “troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet.”
These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

they never thought of entering into any alliance against them; they equally neglected the other obvious method to prevent their incursions, which was, to carry the war into the invaders' country.

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.

I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils, — a blind and furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform.

Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.

Perché il male trionfi è sufficiente che i buoni rinuncino all'azione.

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his /pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs/, — - and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.
But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, — - no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinions.

There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.