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History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.

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
Dead
Living
History
Carpe
Pact
Unborn

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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But a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition, to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke
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Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them.
Edmund Burke
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Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.
Edmund Burke
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An appearance of delicacy, and even fragility, is almost essential to beauty.
Edmund Burke
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Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty.
Edmund Burke
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Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke
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The question is not whether you have a right to render people miserable, but whether it is not in your best interest to make them happy.
Edmund Burke
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Curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections it changes its object perpetually it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied, and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety.
Edmund Burke
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Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.
Edmund Burke
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It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin and about as valuable.
Edmund Burke
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The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality.
Edmund Burke
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A great empire and little minds go ill together.
Edmund Burke
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Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
Edmund Burke
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An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.
Edmund Burke
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A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
Edmund Burke
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My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
Edmund Burke
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I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .
Edmund Burke
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There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.
Edmund Burke
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Woman is not made to be the admiration of everybody , but the happiness of one.
Edmund Burke