Edmund Burke (1729–97) was an immensely influential Anglo-Irish politician, orator, and political thinker. His works include Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790,) which supported rational rather than violent change and made him a spokesperson for European conservatives.
Born in Dublin, Burke began his career in London as a journalist and a philosopher before entering parliament. There he rapidly established a reputation as one of the most formidable orators of an age. He played a significant part in the reduction of royal influence in the House of Commons.
When unrest began in America in the 1760s, Burke was quick to endorse the American colonists in their uprising. He sought better treatment for Catholics and American colonists. He was also involved in the prosecution of Warren Hastings in an attempt to reform colonial India’s government in 1788.
Burke deplored the excesses of the French Revolution in his most celebrated work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. The book provoked a tremendous response, including Thomas Paine‘s The Rights of Man (1791.) Burke emphasized the dangers of mob rule, fearing that the Revolution’s fervor was destroying French society.
Burke retired from parliament in 1794 and continued to write and defend himself from his critics. As one of the founders of the British Conservative tradition, he appealed to the British virtues of continuity, tradition, rank, and property and opposed the French Revolution to the end of his life.
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If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Wealth
An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.
—Edmund Burke
A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.
—Edmund Burke
What morality requires, true statesmanship should accept.
—Edmund Burke
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 moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Progress
Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man’s time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Idleness
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Patience, One liners
Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Ability
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Evil, Thought
How little man is; yet, in his own mind, how great! He is lord and master of all things, yet scarce can command anything. He is given a freedom of his will; but wherefore? Was it but to torment and perplex him the more? How little avails this freedom, if the objects he is to act upon be not as much disposed to obey as he is to command!
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Man
It is undoubtedly the business of ministers very much to consult the inclinations of the people, but they ought to take great care that they do not receive that inclination from the few persons who may happen to approach them.
—Edmund Burke
Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Poetry
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Flattery
There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.
—Edmund Burke
If any ask me what a free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.
—Edmund Burke
Next to love, sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Sympathy
If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing him.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Habit
Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Freedom, Mistakes, Adversity, Difficulty, Anger, Difficulties
The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Teaching
Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
—Edmund Burke
We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Praise, Applause
I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.
—Edmund Burke
Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of the necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degenerate spirits. It is an erect countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind.
—Edmund Burke
That the greatest security of the people, against the encroachments and usurpations of their superiors, is to keep the Spirit of Liberty constantly awake, is an undeniable truth.
—Edmund Burke
What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.
—Edmund Burke
I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
—Edmund Burke
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
—Edmund Burke
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could only do a little.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Helping, Mistakes, Action, One Step at a Time
I did not obey your instructions. No. I conformed to the instructions of truth and Nature, and maintained your interest, against your opinions, with a constancy that became me. A representative worthy of you ought to be a person of stability. I am to look, indeed, to your opinions, but to such opinions as you and I must have five years hence. I was not to look to the flash of the day. I knew that you chose me, in my place, along with others, to be a pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of every fashionable gale.
—Edmund Burke
Make revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Revolution
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Fear, Acting
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