Top 400 Edmund Burke Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.”

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

206. “I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”

— Edmund Burke

207. “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.”

— 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. “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

210. “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

211. “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?”

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

213. “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

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

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

218. “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

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

226. “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

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

231. “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

232. “To innovate is not to reform.”

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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.”

— Edmund Burke

240. “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

241. “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.”

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

243. “Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.”

— Edmund Burke

244. “Not men but measures a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.”

— Edmund Burke

245. “Hypocrisy is no cheap vice; nor can our natural temper be masked for many years together.”

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

248. “Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.”

— Edmund Burke

249. “Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.”

— Edmund Burke

250. “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