Top 400 Edmund Burke Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Geography is an earthly subject, but a heavenly science.”

— Edmund Burke

102. “When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment, we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port to steer.”

— Edmund Burke

103. “The Fate of good men who refuse to become involved in politics is to be ruled by evil men.”

— Edmund Burke

104. “A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.”

— Edmund Burke

105. “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

— Edmund Burke

106. “Circumspection and caution are part of wisdom.”

— Edmund Burke

107. “Nothing so effectually deadens the taste of the sublime as that which is light and radiant.”

— Edmund Burke

108. “By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.”

— Edmund Burke

109. “Is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed? The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, is more than equal to that task.”

— Edmund Burke

110. “It is in the relaxation of security; it is in the expansion of prosperity; it is in the hour of dilatation of the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure, that the real character of men is discerned.”

— Edmund Burke

111. “Thank God, men that art greatly guilty are never wise.”

— Edmund Burke

112. “The only training for the heroic is the mundane.”

— Edmund Burke

113. “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.”

— Edmund Burke

114. “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.”

— Edmund Burke

115. “All virtue which is impracticable is spurious.”

— Edmund Burke

116. “No men can act with effect who do not act in concert; no men can act in concert who do not act with confidence; no men can act with confidence who are not bound together with common opinions, common affections, and common interests.”

— Edmund Burke

117. “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

118. “To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.”

— Edmund Burke

119. “Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.”

— Edmund Burke

120. “Custom reconciles us to everything.”

— Edmund Burke

121. “Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.”

— Edmund Burke

122. “He only deserves to be remembered by posterity who treasures up and preserves the history of his ancestors.”

— Edmund Burke

123. “Education is a nation’s cheapest defence.”

— Edmund Burke

124. “Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.”

— Edmund Burke

125. “Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.”

— Edmund Burke

126. “Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”

— Edmund Burke

127. “Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.”

— Edmund Burke

128. “We begin our public affection in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.”

— Edmund Burke

129. “Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.”

— Edmund Burke

130. “Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.”

— Edmund Burke

131. “True humility-the basis of the Christian system-is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.”

— Edmund Burke

132. “The ocean is an object of no small terror.”

— Edmund Burke

133. “The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous excess, a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all States.”

— Edmund Burke

134. “Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but in selection.”

— Edmund Burke

135. “Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.”

— Edmund Burke

136. “Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.”

— Edmund Burke

137. “Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.”

— Edmund Burke

138. “All wealth is power, so power must infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other.”

— Edmund Burke

139. “We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.”

— Edmund Burke

140. “Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.”

— Edmund Burke

141. “The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.”

— Edmund Burke

142. “Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.”

— Edmund Burke

143. “They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.”

— Edmund Burke

144. “To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.”

— Edmund Burke

145. “Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.”

— Edmund Burke

146. “Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.”

— Edmund Burke

147. “There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.”

— Edmund Burke

148. “I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.”

— Edmund Burke

149. “The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.”

— Edmund Burke

150. “Public calamity is a mighty leveller.”

— Edmund Burke