Edmund Burke Quotes (270 quotes, page 4)

“Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.”

Edmund Burke

Speech on the Independence of Parliament (1780)

Business

“A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”

Edmund Burke

Works of Edmund Burke Volume ii, p. 117
Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

People

“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.”

Edmund Burke

Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election http://books.google.com/books?id=DAAUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA435&dq=%22we+are+generally+cold,+and+languid,+and+sluggish%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=D4TSUuXqDYrekQe6uoH4Cw&ved=0CFAQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=%22we%20are%20generally%20cold%2C%20and%20languid%2C%20and%20sluggish%22&f=false (6 September 1780)
1780s

Passion

“Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.”

Edmund Burke

No. 1
Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

Country

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

Edmund Burke

15 February 1788, Third Day, volume x, p. 54
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)

“It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform.”

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Noble Lord

Source: A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), p. 20

Time

“You can never plan the future by the past.”

Edmund Burke

Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Attitude , Graduation , Past , Future

“I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets.”

Edmund Burke

Letter to Matthew Smith
Undated

Sleep , Country

“It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest; and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as to the best. Of this stamp is the cant of not man, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.”

Edmund Burke book Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)

Wisdom , Men , People , Light

“The march of the human mind is slow.”

Edmund Burke

Works of Edmund Burke Volume ii, p. 149
Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

“It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.”

Edmund Burke

Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Love , People , Sense

“Mr. Burke talked in very high terms of Dr. Adam Smith; praised the clearness and depth of his understanding, his profound and extensive learning, and the vast accession that had accrued to British literature and philosophy from these exertions, and described his heart as being equally good with his head and his manners as peculiarly pleasing. Mr. Smith, he said, told him, after they had conversed on subjects of political economy, that he was the only man, who, without communication, thought on these topics exactly as he did.”

Edmund Burke

Robert Bisset, The Life of Edmund Burke. Volume II (London: G. Cawthorn, 1800), pp. 428-9
Undated

Communication , Literature , Understanding , Learning

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

Edmund Burke

Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Freedom

“Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“Falsehood has a perennial spring.”

Edmund Burke

First Speech on the Conciliation with America (1774)

Spring

“Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“By the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young; but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Wisdom , Age , Time

“Through a wise and salutary neglect [of the colonies], a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.”

Edmund Burke

Works of Edmund Burke Volume ii, p. 117
Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Wisdom , Way , Feeling , Nature

“Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found, to — my voice fails me; my inclination indeed carries me no farther — all is confusion beyond it.”

Edmund Burke

First Speech on the Conciliation with America (1774)

People , Thinking

“Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.”

Edmund Burke

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

“If we owe to it [civil society] any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and will are even contradictory terms. Now though civil society might be at first a voluntary act (which in many cases it undoubtedly was) its continuance is under a permanent standing covenant, coexisting with the society; and it attaches upon every individual of that society, without any formal act of his own. This is warranted by the general practice, arising out of the general sense of mankind.”

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

Source: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), p. 442

Sense

“It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.”

Edmund Burke

First Speech on the Conciliation with America (1774)

Nature

“Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.”

Edmund Burke

Letter to William Smith, Member of the Irish Parliament (29 January 1795), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VIII: September 1794–April 1796 (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 128
/ 1790s

Religion , Indifference

“It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.”

Edmund Burke

Preface to Brissot's Address (1794)
1790s

Law

“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; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 344
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Imagination

“Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual. Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option. I allow, that if no supreme ruler exists, wise to form, and potent to enforce, the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis, let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.”

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

Source: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), p. 442

Life , Men , Law , Strong

“Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to any thing but power for their relief.”

Edmund Burke

Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

“I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government.”

Edmund Burke

Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

“One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.”

Edmund Burke

15 February 1788
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)

Evil

“Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Reality

“"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.”

Edmund Burke book A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)

War , Peace , Imagination , Nature

“No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits.”

Edmund Burke

Speech on the Independence of Parliament (1780)

“They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.”

Edmund Burke

Speech on the Independence of Parliament (1780)

Error

“To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 497
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Law

“All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.”

Edmund Burke

No. 1, volume v, p. 286
Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

Youth , History , Nature

“The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Change

“The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.”

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

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

“The art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.”

Edmund Burke

Burke's description of poetry, quoted from his conversation in Prior's Life of Burke
Undated

Art

“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.”

Edmund Burke

The reference is to Charles Townshend (1725–1767)
First Speech on the Conciliation with America (1774)

Soul , Passion

“Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.”

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Noble Lord

A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796)

“Young man, there is America — which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.”

Edmund Burke

Works of Edmund Burke Volume ii, p. 115
Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Death , Men , World , Envy

“A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”

Edmund Burke

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (3 April 1777); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1899), vol. 2, p. 206
1770s

“To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.”

Edmund Burke

First Speech on the Conciliation with America (1774)

Love , Men

“The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

World , Religion , Confidence , Perfection

“Laws, like houses, lean on one another.”

Edmund Burke

From the Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland (c. 1766), not published during Burke's lifetime.
1760s

Law , Housing

“To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.”

Edmund Burke

Attributed in Captain William Kidd: And Others of the Pirates Or Buccaneers who Ravaged the Seas, the Islands, and the Continents of America Two Hundred Years Ago (1876) by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, p. 179
Undated