Edmund Burke

I found myself a partaker in a very high trust; and having no sort of reason to rely on the strength of my natural abilities for the proper execution of that trust, I was obliged to take more than common pains to instruct myself in…

They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power.

This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American war.

The whole is delusion, from one end to the other.

But though I do not hazard anything approaching to a censure on the motives of former Parliaments to all those alterations, one fact is undoubted,--that under them the state of America has been kept in continual agitation.

There is a law of neighborhood which does not leave a man perfect master on his own ground.

Those which are rather conclusions of legal reason than matters of statutable provision belong to universal equity, and are universally applicable.

It has ever been the method of public jurists to draw a great part of the analogies on which they form the law of nations from the principles of law which prevail in civil community.

I felt this as one of those few moments in which decorum yields to an higher duty.

Its foundation is laid in Regicide, in Jacobinism, and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles a body of systematic manners which secures their operation.

All the relations of life are at once dissolved.

Instead of the religion and the law by which they were in a great politic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their republic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are…

On the other hand, being totally destitute of all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, I was very sure, that, if my proposition were futile or dangerous, if it were weakly conceived or improperly timed, there was nothing exterior…

On this head the parent law is express and clear, and has made many wise provisions, which, without destroying, regulate and restrain the right of ownership by the right of vicinage.

Such another example of boldness and contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.

So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English.

Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is, let me say, of no mean force in the government of mankind.

God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices!

He claims glory and renown from that by which every other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and disgraced.

It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.

But the concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.

The tenderness of the executive power is the natural asylum of those upon whom the laws have declared war; and to complain that men are inclined to favor the means of their own safety is so absurd, that one forgets the injustice in the…

He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers.

My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character.

A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion.