Edmund Burke

Bekannte Zitate von Edmund Burke

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

Education is the cheap defense of nations.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

When bad men combine, the good must associate else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

You can never plan the future by the past.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.