The collection / 226 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1763 AD

There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom.

Edmund Burke / quote

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02c. 1763 AD

There never was a bad man but had ability for good service.

Edmund Burke / quote

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03c. 1763 AD

Those who attempt to level never equalise; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.

Edmund Burke / quote

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04c. 1763 AD

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

Edmund Burke / quote

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05c. 1763 AD

Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever.

Edmund Burke / quote

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06c. 1763 AD

Unsociable tempers are contracted in solitude, which will in the end not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them nor ourselves better by flying from or quarrelling with them.

Edmund Burke / quote

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07c. 1763 AD

War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated.

Edmund Burke / quote

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08c. 1763 AD

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

Edmund Burke / quote

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09c. 1763 AD

When the reason of old establishments is gone, it is absurd to keep nothing but the burden of them. This is superstitiously to embalm a carcase not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to embalm it.

Edmund Burke / quote

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10c. 1763 AD

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe.

Edmund Burke / quote

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11c. 1763 AD

Whoever is a genuine follower of truth, keeps his eye steady upon his guide, indifferent whither he is lead, provided that she is the leader.

Edmund Burke / quote

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12c. 1763 AD

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an admixture of it in some trifling or enthusiastic shape or other; else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest.

Edmund Burke / quote

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13c. 1763 AD

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Edmund Burke / quote

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14c. 1763 AD

Religion is the basis of civil society.

Edmund Burke / quote

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15c. 1763 AD

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar. The pride of no person in a flourishing condition is more justly to be dreaded than that of him who is mean and cringing under a doubtful and unprosperous fortune.

Edmund Burke / quote

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16c. 1763 AD

America is as yet in the youth and gristle of her strength.

Edmund Burke / quote

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17c. 1763 AD

An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to beauty.

Edmund Burke / quote

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18c. 1763 AD

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposing beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field—that, of course, they are many in number,—or, that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

Edmund Burke / quote

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19c. 1763 AD

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

Edmund Burke / quote

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20c. 1763 AD

Crimes lead into one another. They who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Edmund Burke / quote

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21c. 1763 AD

I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power from an obscure condition ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The Temple of Honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Edmund Burke / quote

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22c. 1763 AD

But for my part, my lord, I then thought, and am still of the same opinion, that error, and not truth of any kind, is dangerous; that ill conclusions can only flow from false propositions; and that, to know whether any proposition be true or false, it is a preposterous method to examine it by its apparent consequences.

Edmund Burke / quote

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23c. 1763 AD

Obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory.

Edmund Burke / quote

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24c. 1763 AD

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

Edmund Burke / quote

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