Quotes
Quotes - Burke
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.
The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.
To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.
But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance, it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Make revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man.
Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.
The worthy gentleman [Mr. Coombe], who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, while 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.
The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our ideas of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasion to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.
A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would by my standard of a statesman.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.
Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought that never wanders, the purpose that never wavers - these are the masters of victory.
What shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart.
If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
But the concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
