Quotes by Edmund Burke

“Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one.”

“The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.”

“The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.”

“No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

“But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liber...”

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (1794)]”

“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.”

“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”

“Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

“Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.”

“It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.”

“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”

“If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow...”

“If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.”

“An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of anoth...”

“Our patience will achieve more than our force.”