Edmund Burke
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 appetite.Collection: Revenge
Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty.Collection: Men
Evil prevails when good men fail to act.Collection: Men
There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.Collection: Wisdom
The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality.Collection: Leadership
Dogs are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute creation.Collection: Dog
They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.Collection: Failure
Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.Collection: Party
In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.Collection: Country
Though ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness; for it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness for any use.Collection: Opposites
I decline the election. It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.Collection: Effort
To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.Collection: Freedom
Depend upon it that the lovers of freedom will be free.Collection: Freedom
Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.Collection: Matter
Teach me, O lark! with thee to greatly rise, to exalt my soul and lift it to the skies.Collection: Sky
Flattery is no more than what raises in a man's mind an idea of a preference which he has not.Collection: Men
Dangers by being despised grow great.Collection: Hate
Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.Collection: Men
In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.Collection: Art
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.Collection: Writing
A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act.Collection: Despair
An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.Collection: Arms
For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoeverCollection: Views
Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.Collection: Unjust
Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.Collection: Mean
Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.Collection: Christian
The same sun which gilds all nature, and exhilarates the whole creation, does not shine upon disappointed ambition.Collection: Ambition
There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed upon. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.Collection: Men
I own that there is a haughtiness and fierceness in human nature which will cause innumerable broils, place men in what situation you please.Collection: Men
The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.Collection: Sturdy
Futurity is the great concern of mankind.Collection: Mankind
The parties are the gamesters; but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the winner in the end.Collection: Party
I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.Collection: Childhood
In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered.Collection: Wisdom
The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.Collection: Wise
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.Collection: Liberty
A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.Collection: May
Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.Collection: Wise
Over-taxation cost England her colonies of North America.Collection: America
I do ride contend against the advantages of distrust. In the world we live in, it is but too necessary. Some of old called it the very sinews of discretion.Collection: World
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.Collection: Wisdom
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 it combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.Collection: Wisdom
Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.Collection: Weakness
Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.Collection: Men
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!Collection: Life
He who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; and he who profits by a superior understanding raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior standing he unites with.Collection: Advice
Continue to instruct the world; and - whilst we carry on a poor unequal conflict with the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons than other passions and prejudices of our own - convey wisdom to future generations.Collection: Passion
It is by bribing, not so often by being bribed, that wicked politicians bring ruin on mankind. Avarice is a rival to the pursuits of many.Collection: Wicked
By looking into physical causes our minds are opened and enlarged; and in this pursuit, whether we take or whether we lose the game, the chase is certainly of service.Collection: Games