Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke (January 12, 1729 – July 9, 1797) was an Irish political philosopher, Whig politician and statesman who is often regarded as the "father" of modern conservatism.

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• There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and, what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.
  • An account of the European Settlements in America (1757), pp. 19-20, in The Works of Edmund Burke in Nine Volumes, Vol. IX. Boston: Little, Brown, 1839.

• Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
  • From the Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland (c. 1766), not published during Burke's lifetime.

• There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
  • Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769)

• It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.
  • Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769)

• The wisdom of our ancestors.
  • Burke is credited by some with the first use of this phrase, in Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769); also in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) and Discussion on the Traitorous Correspondence Bill (1793)

• Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
  • Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters (1773-03-07)

• I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.
  • Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters (1773-03-07)

• 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.
  • Speech to the Electors of Bristol (1774-11-03)

• 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.
  • Speech to the Electors of Bristol (1774-11-03); as published in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1834)

• People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.
  • Letter to Charles James Fox (1777-10-08)

• Applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, cheer us when we recover.
  • Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (1780)

• Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
  • Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election (1780)

• I decline the election. — It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.
  • Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (1780-09-09)

• Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.
  • Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (1780-09-09)
  • Referring to a Mr. Coombe

• He was not merely a chip of the old Block, but the old Block itself.
  • On Pitt's First Speech (1781-02-26), from Wraxall's Memoirs, First Series, vol. i. p. 342.

• The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.
  • Speech on Reform of Representation in the House of Commons (1782-05-07)

• The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
  • Speech at a County Meeting of Buckinghamshire (1784)

• Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
  • Letter to M. de Menonville (October 1789)

• They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man.
  • On the Army Estimates (1790)

• You can never plan the future by the past.
  • Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

• Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
  • Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

• Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to any thing but power for their relief.
  • Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

• Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
  • Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

• Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.
  • Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old (1791)

• So far as it has gone, it probably is the most pure and defecated publick good which ever has been conferred on mankind.
  • Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old (1791)
  • On Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791

• There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.
  • Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old (1791)

• We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.
  • Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792)

• Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.
  • Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians (1792-05-11)

• Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.
  • Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians (1792-05-11)

• It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.
  • Preface to Brissot's Address (1794)

• The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
  • Preface to Brissot's Address (1794)

• Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
  • Preface to Brissot's Address (1794)

• Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.
  • Letter to William Smith (January 1795)

• And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
  • Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795)

• Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations — wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
  • Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795)

• I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets.
  • Letter to Matthew Smith

• The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
  • Letter to Thomas Mercer

• A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
  • Letter to Richard Burke

• When Croft's "Life of Dr. Young" was spoken of as a good imitation of Dr. Johnson's style, "No, no," said he, "it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration."
  • Comment quoted by Matthew Prior in his Life of Burke

• The art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
  • Burke's description of poetry, quoted from his conversation in Prior's Life of Burke.

• 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.
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 261.

A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind (1756)

• "War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

• A good parson once said that where mystery begins religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins, justice ends?

• The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

• The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.

• The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

• Custom reconciles us to every thing.

• No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

• I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.

• A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our idea of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)

• It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest; and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as to the best. Of this stamp is the cant of not man, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.

• The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man. This is felt. The quarrel is begun between the Representatives and the People. The Court Faction have at length committed them. In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any land-marks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us. At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases.

• When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

• So to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen.

• Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.

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