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

We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Religion

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

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Evil, Enemy

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

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Wealth

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

Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Vice

Free governments have committed more flagrant acts of tyranny than the most perfectly despotic governments we have ever known.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Tyranny

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 understanding he unites with.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Advice, Knowledge, Understanding, Conflict

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

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

Slavery is a state so improper, so degrading, so ruinous to the feelings and capacities of human nature, that it ought not to be suffered to exist.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Slavery

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

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

Let us only suffer any person to tell us his story, morning and evening, but for one twelve-month, and he will become our master.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Perseverance

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 could be by the perfidy of others.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Confidence

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

A great object is always answered, whenever any property is transferred from hands that are not fit for that property to those that are.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Property

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.
—Edmund Burke

To innovate is not to reform.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Innovation, One liners

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

An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Oppression

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

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: War

It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Business

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

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

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions; any bungler can add to the old; but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them?
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Taxation, Taxes

In a democracy the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority…and that oppression of the majority will extend to far great number, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. Under a cruel prince they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation: they seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Democracy

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Government

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