Top 400 Edmund Burke Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”

— Edmund Burke

202. “Parliament is a deliberate assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purpose, not local prejudices ought to guide but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.”

— Edmund Burke

203. “Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.”

— Edmund Burke

204. “Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”

— Edmund Burke

205. “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.”

— Edmund Burke

206. “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

— Edmund Burke

207. “I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pain of others.”

— Edmund Burke

208. “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 the most to the perpetuation of society itself.”

— Edmund Burke

209. “The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements-success.”

— Edmund Burke

210. “The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.”

— Edmund Burke

211. “As mankind becomes more enlightened to know their real interests, they will esteem the value of agriculture; they will find it in their natural – their destined occupation.”

— Edmund Burke

212. “Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue.”

— Edmund Burke

213. “I own that there is a haughtiness and fierceness in human nature which will cause innumerable broils, place men in what situation you please.”

— Edmund Burke

214. “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”

— Edmund Burke

215. “Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young peoples, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.”

— Edmund Burke

216. “A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”

— Edmund Burke

217. “Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.”

— Edmund Burke

218. “Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.”

— Edmund Burke

219. “Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.”

— Edmund Burke

220. “They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man.”

— Edmund Burke

221. “It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly.”

— Edmund Burke

222. “Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves.”

— Edmund Burke

223. “I cannot help concurring with the opinion that an absolute democracy, no more than absolute monarchy, is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government.”

— Edmund Burke

224. “The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.”

— Edmund Burke

225. “That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.”

— Edmund Burke

226. “An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.”

— Edmund Burke

227. “Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.”

— Edmund Burke

228. “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.”

— Edmund Burke

229. “No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.”

— Edmund Burke

230. “The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.”

— Edmund Burke

231. “To reach the height of our ambition is like trying to reach the rainbow; as we advance it recedes.”

— Edmund Burke

232. “Whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.”

— Edmund Burke

233. “It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.”

— Edmund Burke

234. “Dogs are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute creation...”

— Edmund Burke

235. “The yielding of the weak is the concession to fear.”

— Edmund Burke

236. “A nation is not conquered which is perpetually to be conquered.”

— Edmund Burke

237. “Depend upon it that the lovers of freedom will be free.”

— Edmund Burke

238. “The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.”

— Edmund Burke

239. “We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.”

— Edmund Burke

240. “Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence.”

— Edmund Burke

241. “All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.”

— Edmund Burke

242. “Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. 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.”

— Edmund Burke

243. “Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded.”

— Edmund Burke

244. “To innovate is not to reform.”

— Edmund Burke

245. “When slavery is established in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.”

— Edmund Burke

246. “You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.”

— Edmund Burke

247. “Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations.”

— Edmund Burke

248. “The superfluities of a rich nation furnish a better object of trade than the necessities of a poor one. It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.”

— Edmund Burke

249. “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

250. “When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand.”

— Edmund Burke