Edmund Burke
Good order is the foundation of all things.
You can never plan the future by the past.
Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.
I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.
No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny.
All government -- indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act -- is founded on compromise and barter.
Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises; for never intending to go beyond promises; it costs nothing.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.
Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
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.
A man who works beyond the surface of things,though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others and may make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth.
He who wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others and may make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
