Edmund Burke

With regard to the person who cannot come up to your market, a tyrannous aristocracy, as against him, is established at the very outset, by you who pretend to be its sworn foe.

You order him to buy the right which you before told him Nature had given to him gratuitously at his birth, and of which no authority on earth could lawfully deprive him.

What! a qualification on the indefeasible rights of men?

The means taught by experience may be better suited to political ends than those contrived in the original project.

In them we often see the end best obtained, where the means seem not perfectly reconcilable to what we may fancy was the original scheme.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest.

Some very unusual appearances of wisdom ought to display themselves on the face of the designs of those who appeal to no practice and who copy after no model.

But the physician of the state, who, not satisfied with the cure of distempers, undertakes to regenerate constitutions, ought to show uncommon powers.

Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.

I believe, that, were Rousseau alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical frenzy of his scholars, who in their paradoxes are servile imitators, and even in their incredulity discover an implicit faith.

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

By listening only to these, your leaders regard all things only on the side of their vices and faults, and view those vices and faults under every color of exaggeration.

The worst of it is, that this their despair of curing common distempers by regular methods arises not only from defect of comprehension, but, I fear, from some malignity of disposition.

By their violent haste, and their defiance of the process of Nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchemist and empiric.

What your politicians think the marks of a bold, hardy genius are only proofs of a deplorable want of ability.

To proceed in this manner, that is, to proceed with a presiding principle and a prolific energy, is with me the criterion of profound wisdom.

If justice requires this, the work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish.

Where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are so deeply to affect them.

We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men.

The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise.

By a slow, but well-sustained progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at.

Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means.

It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance; but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate.