Top 400 Edmund Burke Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.”

— Edmund Burke

252. “Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.”

— Edmund Burke

253. “Both the Sublime and the Beautiful induce a state of submission that is often combined with the possibility of getting lost. They disorientate and undermine purpose. In one of several erotic sections in the Enquiry Burke describes the experience of looking at a beautiful woman’s body: it is, he writes, like a ‘deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye glides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried’. It.”

— Edmund Burke

254. “Contempt is not a thing to be despised. It may be borne with a calm and equal mind, but no man, by lifting his head high, can pretend that he does not perceive the scorns that are poured down on him from above.”

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

256. “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close.”

— Edmund Burke

257. “Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because, of all enemies, it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.”

— Edmund Burke

258. “It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.”

— Edmund Burke

259. “Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding.”

— Edmund Burke

260. “The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.”

— Edmund Burke

261. “An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.”

— Edmund Burke

262. “The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst 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.”

— Edmund Burke

263. “In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters, – that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. This it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations.”

— Edmund Burke

264. “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

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

— Edmund Burke

266. “Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.”

— Edmund Burke

267. “Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man.”

— Edmund Burke

268. “No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.”

— Edmund Burke

269. “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

270. “You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.”

— Edmund Burke

271. “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

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

— Edmund Burke

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

— Edmund Burke

274. “The question is not whether you have a right to render people miserable, but whether it is not in your best interest to make them happy.”

— Edmund Burke

275. “The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But.”

— Edmund Burke

276. “The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.”

— Edmund Burke

277. “If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.”

— Edmund Burke

278. “An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.”

— Edmund Burke

279. “Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.”

— Edmund Burke

280. “The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.”

— Edmund Burke

281. “Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn.”

— Edmund Burke

282. “Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.”

— Edmund Burke

283. “Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”

— Edmund Burke

284. “He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.”

— Edmund Burke

285. “Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.”

— Edmund Burke

286. “There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.”

— Edmund Burke

287. “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.”

— Edmund Burke

288. “To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil.”

— Edmund Burke

289. “All government is founded on compromise and banter.”

— Edmund Burke

290. “It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.”

— Edmund Burke

291. “Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.”

— Edmund Burke

292. “It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.”

— Edmund Burke

293. “My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.”

— Edmund Burke

294. “If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.”

— Edmund Burke

295. “A jealous lover lights his torch from the firebrand of the fiend.”

— Edmund Burke

296. “The greatest crimes do not arise from a want of feeling for others but from an over-sensibilit y for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires.”

— Edmund Burke

297. “I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.”

— Edmund Burke

298. “The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.”

— Edmund Burke

299. “Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new compositions, any bungler can add to the old.”

— Edmund Burke

300. “Surely the church is a place where one day’s truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.”

— Edmund Burke