"Evil prevails when good men fail to act."
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Quote collection
Edmund Burke quotes (page 4 of 25)
492 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature."
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"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."
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"The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity."
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"And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them."
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"The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion."
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"When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people."
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"Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant."
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"Education is the cheap defense of nations."
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"If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed."
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"Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation."
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"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
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"Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings."
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"Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle."
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"Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial."
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"Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and a higher economy. Economy is a distinctive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection."
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"Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind."
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"To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind."
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"There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world."
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"All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society."
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