"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."
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Quote collection
Edmund Burke quotes (page 16 of 25)
492 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind."
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"Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity."
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"Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice."
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"I own that there is a haughtiness and fierceness in human nature which will cause innumerable broils, place men in what situation you please."
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"To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty."
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"A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act."
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"Flattery is no more than what raises in a man's mind an idea of a preference which he has not."
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"Dangers by being despised grow great."
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"Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions."
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"Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren."
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"The introduction of Christianity, which, under whatever form, always confers such inestimable benefits on mankind, soon made a sensible change in these rude and fierce manners."
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"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself."
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"Contempt is not a thing to be despised. It may be borne with a calm and equal mind, but no man, by lifting his head high, can pretend that he does not perceive the scorns that are poured down on him from above."
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"Curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied, and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety."
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"Laws, like houses, lean on one another."
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"Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion."
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"Though ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness; for it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness for any use."
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"Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. A great profusion of things which are splendid or valuable in themselves is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur."
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"In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."
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