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It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Edmund Burke

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Edmund Burke
Age: 68 †
Born: 1729
Born: January 12
Died: 1797
Died: July 9
Philosopher
Politician
Statesman
Writer
Dublin city
Dignity
Nature
Exact
Statistics
Greatness

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements-success.
Edmund Burke
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Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions any bungler can add to the old but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them?
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Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.
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The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men to each govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.
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I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.
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Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director and regulator, the standard of them all.
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A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.
Edmund Burke
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To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
Edmund Burke
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The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought that never wanders, the purpose that never wavers - these are the masters of victory.
Edmund Burke
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Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.
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Custom reconciles us to everything.
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The very name of a politician, a statesman, is sure to cause terror and hatred it has always connected with it the ideas of treachery, cruelty, fraud, and tyranny.
Edmund Burke
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Circumspection and caution are part of wisdom.
Edmund Burke
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My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
Edmund Burke
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History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.
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Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.
Edmund Burke
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The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
Edmund Burke
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I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pain of others
Edmund Burke
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Falsehood is a perennial spring.
Edmund Burke
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There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times.
Edmund Burke