Quotes
Quotes - Burke
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.
Chapter of accidents.
Dignity belongs to the conquered.
Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
Young man, there is America--which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.
Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.
We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.
When we speak of the commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
He was not merely a chip of the old Block, but the old Block itself.
All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.
That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.
It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Ita!0 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on.
There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.
A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
