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
If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing him.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Habits, Habit
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
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
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
Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs, and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Curiosity, Questioning, Politicians, Politics
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Wealth
I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Planning
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.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Liberty
Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Youth
Whatever disunites man from God disunites man from man.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Unity, Sin
Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Tolerance
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.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Navy, The Military, Army
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
The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Youth
An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Oppression
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
The Christian religion, by confining marriage to pairs, and rendering the relation indissoluble, has by these two things done more toward the peace, happiness, settlement, and civilization of the world, than by any other part in this whole scheme of divine wisdom.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Marriage
Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Money, Economy, Economics
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Superstition
Man is an animal that cooks his victuals.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Man
No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Government
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Action
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
Instead of casting away our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted 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 in this stock each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themseive of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Reason, Prejudice
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. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Society
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
There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.
—Edmund Burke
Now, as a law directed against the mass of the nation has not the nature of a reasonable institution, so neither has it the authority: for in all forms of government the people is the true legislator; and whether the immediate and instrumental cause of the law be a single person or many, the remote and efficient cause is the consent of the people, either actual or implied ; and such consent is absolutely essential to its validity.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Government
There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Imagination
Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.
—Edmund Burke
Topics: Vice
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