Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Edmund Burke (British Philosopher, Statesman)

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.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edmund Burke

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Prejudice

Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Corruption

Never expecting to find perfection in men, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious hypocrites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They who raise suspicions on the good, on account of the behavior of ill men, are of the party of the latter.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Virtue

What morality requires, true statesmanship should accept.
—Edmund Burke

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Compromise, Enjoyment, Government

Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Power

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Emotions, Curiosity

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
Topics: Hate, Passion

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.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Charity

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Events, Shame

Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest, manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostasy.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Vice, Influence

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Law, Lawyers

You can never plan the future by the past.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Tomorrow, Time Management, Time, The Future, Planning, The Past, Future

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: People

It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Inspiration

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We might as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Progress

Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his understanding, and makes his mind paralytic.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Vice

He censures God who quarrels with the imperfections of men.
—Edmund Burke

Despots govern by terror.—They know that he who fears God fears nothing else, and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire and Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage.
—Edmund Burke

Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Solitude, Relationships, Temper

To please universally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Taxation, Taxes

Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Doubt, Worry, Perseverance, Work

It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observances of time and place and of decency in general, that what is called taste consists; and which is in reality no other than a more refined judgment. The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Taste

The true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Freedom, Liberty

There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Tolerance

Those things that are not practicable are not desirable. There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well protected pursuit. There is nothing that God has judged good for us that he has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world. If we cry, like children, for the moon, like children we must cry on.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Desire, Opportunities

When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Evil

I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Power

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Parliament

Man is an animal that cooks his victuals.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Man

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