Edmund Burke Quotes

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)]

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.

Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one.

No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

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.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Το να διαβάζεις χωρίς να στοχάζεσαι είναι σαν να τρως χωρίς να χωνεύεις.

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.