Those who are bountiful to crimes will be rigid to merit and penurious to service.
Edmund Burke: “Those who are bountiful to crimes will be rigid to merit and penurious to service.”
Editor's note · Context
Burke reflects on the disparity in how society rewards crime versus merit.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.
Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what they have left; and standing on the firm ground of the British Constitution, let us be satisfied to admire, rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights, the aëronauts of…
I think our happy situation owing to our Constitution,--but owing to the whole of it, and not to any part singly,--owing in a great measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews and reformations, as well as to what we have…
I would not exclude alteration neither; but even when I changed, it should be to preserve.





