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In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.

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
Giving
Law
Lawyer
Community
Dresses
Sanction
Force
Direction
Legislature
Sense
Effect
Sanctions
True
General
Inclination
Ends
Follow
Technical
Form
Effects
Specific
Give
Public
Dress

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An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
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Is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed? The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, is more than equal to that task.
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The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him he indulges it, he loves it but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
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Applaud us when we run, Console us when we fall, Cheer us when we recover.
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The greatest crimes do not arise from a want of feeling for others but from an over-sensibilit y for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires
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What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!
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Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new compositions, any bungler can add to the old.
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Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence.
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Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.
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Religion is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by virtue.
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It is by sympathy we enter into the concerns of others, that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy may be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.
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Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
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The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.
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As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.
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Oppression makes wise men mad but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.
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Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all it combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights but not to equal things.
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A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
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The wisdom of our ancestors.
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A great empire and little minds go ill together.
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Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.
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