Top 400 Edmund Burke Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.”

— Edmund Burke

402. “It is by bribing, not so often by being bribed, that wicked politicians bring ruin on mankind. Avarice is a rival to the pursuits of many.”

— Edmund Burke

403. “The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men to each govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.”

— Edmund Burke

404. “Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.”

— Edmund Burke

405. “THE CHARACTERISTIC passion of Burke’s life was his love of order.”

— Edmund Burke

406. “A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is torn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion.”

— Edmund Burke

407. “When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No-body will be argued into slavery.”

— Edmund Burke

408. “There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed upon. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.”

— Edmund Burke

409. “Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever; but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.”

— Edmund Burke

410. “Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.”

— Edmund Burke

411. “When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.”

— Edmund Burke

412. “Laws are commanded to hold their tongues among arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.”

— Edmund Burke

413. “The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.”

— Edmund Burke

414. “The mind of man possesses a sort of creative power on its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination.”

— Edmund Burke

415. “A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.”

— Edmund Burke

416. “It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact; and great trade will always be attended with considerable abuses. The contraband will always keep pace in some measure with the fair trade. It should stand as a fundamental maxim, that no vulgar precaution ought to be employed in the cure of evils, which are closely connected with the cause of our prosperity.”

— Edmund Burke

417. “Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.”

— Edmund Burke

418. “There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober aspect of truth.”

— Edmund Burke

419. “There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.”

— Edmund Burke

420. “Whilst every principle of authority and resistance has been pushed, upon both sides, as far as it would go, there is nothing so solid and certain, either in reasoning or in practice, that has not been shaken.”

— Edmund Burke

421. “The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.”

— Edmund Burke

422. “Astonishment is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree, the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect.”

— Edmund Burke

423. “Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force.”

— Edmund Burke

424. “A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.”

— Edmund Burke

425. “We ought with reverence to approach that tremendous divinity, that loves courage, but commands counsel.”

— Edmund Burke

426. “It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.”

— Edmund Burke

427. “In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.”

— Edmund Burke

428. “Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the character of the age.”

— Edmund Burke

429. “A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act.”

— Edmund Burke

430. “In these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public.”

— Edmund Burke

431. “Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm.”

— Edmund Burke

432. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”

— Edmund Burke

433. “Untried forms of government may, to unstable minds, recommend themselves even by their novelty.”

— Edmund Burke

434. “The great has terror for its basis... the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure...”

— Edmund Burke

435. “It is the duty of those who claim to rule over others not to provoke them beyond the necessity of the case, nor to leave stings in their minds which must long rankle even when the appearance of tranquillity is restored.”

— Edmund Burke

436. “It is an obvious truth, that no constitution can defend itself: it must be defended by the wisdom and fortitude of men.”

— Edmund Burke

437. “A revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.”

— Edmund Burke

438. “Thus are two ideas as opposite as can be imagined reconciled in the extremes of both; and both, in spite of their opposite nature, brought to concur in producing the sublime. And this is not the only instance wherein the opposite extremes operate equally in favor of the sublime, which in all things abhors mediocrity.”

— Edmund Burke

439. “But surely beauty is no idea belonging to mensuration; nor has it anything to do with calculation and geometry. If it had, we might then point out some certain measures which we could demonstrate to be beautiful, either as simply considered, or as related to others; and we could call in those natural objects, for whose beauty we have no voucher but the sense, to this happy standard, and confirm the voice of our passions by the determination of our reason.”

— Edmund Burke

440. “It is no strange thing, to those who look into the nature of corrupted man, to find a violent persecutor a perfect unbeliever of his own creed.”

— Edmund Burke

441. “I should imagine, that the influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.”

— Edmund Burke

442. “Now, whatever, either on good or upon bad grounds, tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind.”

— Edmund Burke

443. “I shall begin with the third sort of words; compound abstracts, such as virtue, honor, persuasion, docility. Of these I am convinced, that whatever power they may have on the passions, they do not derive it from any representation raised in the mind of the things for which they stand. As compositions, they are not real essences, and hardly cause, I think, any real ideas.”

— Edmund Burke

444. “More observe the characters of men than the order of things: to the one we are formed by Nature, and by that sympathy from which we are so strongly led to take a part in the passions and manners of our fellow-men; the other is, as it were, foreign and extrinsical.”

— Edmund Burke