Edmund Burke: Trending quotes (page 7)

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“A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.”

Edmund Burke book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Introduction On Taste
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Way , Nature

“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.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Idea , Personality

“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.”

Edmund Burke book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Part I Section V
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Love , Pain , Suffering , Passion

“So far as it has gone, it probably is the most pure and defecated publick good which ever has been conferred on mankind.”

Edmund Burke book An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

On the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791
Source: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), p. 463

“We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.”

Edmund Burke

No. 1
Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

“Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Birth

“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Justice , Departure

“Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.”

Edmund Burke

Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

“I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.”

Edmund Burke

Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters (7 March 1773)
1770s

Religion , Parting

“Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.”

Edmund Burke

Letter to M. de Menonville (October 1789)
1780s

Justice

“A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Country

“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.”

Edmund Burke

Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

“No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“Resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication.”

Edmund Burke

7 May 1789
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)

“Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Men , Way

“Boldness formerly was not the character of Atheists as such. … But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.”

Edmund Burke

"Thoughts on French Affairs" (December 1791), in Three Memorials on French Affairs (1797), p. 53
1790s

“Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in.”

Edmund Burke

No. 1, p. 172 in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: A New Edition, v. VIII. London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1815
Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

Law

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

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 277
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

World , Nature , Universe , Drawing