Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
Author
Edmund Burke
60 quotations
About Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influ…
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Edmund BurkeMagnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
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.
I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
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 tim…
You can never plan the future by the past.
Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
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Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory they have no power over the substance of original justice.
People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
When bad men combine, the good must associate else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations.
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.
To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.