"The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements-success."
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Quote collection
Edmund Burke quotes (page 21 of 25)
492 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence."
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"Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading through up to your eyes in blood, you could only end up where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found... all is confusion beyond it."
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"The grand instructor, time."
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"They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."
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"All writers on the science of policy are agreed, and they agree with experience, that all governments must frequently infringe the rules of justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity itself to the reigning of interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of state."
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"Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind."
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"Man is by his constitution a religious animal; atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts."
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"The people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement."
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"I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations ."
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"It is from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the mind, that mathematical speculations derive some of the most considerable advantages; because there is nothing to interest the imagination; because the judgment sits free and unbiased to examine the point. All proportions, every arrangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, because the same truths result to it from all; from greater from lesser, from equality and inequality."
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"One source of the sublime is infinity."
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"I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other."
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"What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!"
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"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own."
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"To be struck with His power, it is only necessary to open our eyes."
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"Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind."
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"Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils."
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"There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well-protected pursuit."
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"No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy."
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