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Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.

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
Like
Operations
Insensible
Manners
Purify
Breathe
Uniform
Importance
Courtesy
Debase
Laws
Uniforms
Vex
Constant
Corrupt
Exalt
Air
Operation
Soothe
Law
Steady
Refine

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
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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.
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When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
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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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The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
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There ought to be system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
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Nnothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues.
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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 .
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Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.
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The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst his desires were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.
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Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.
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Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
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Knowledge of those unalterable Relations which Providence has ordained that every thing should bear to every other...To these we should conform in good Earnest and not think to force Nature, and the whole Order of her System, by a Compliance with our Pride, and Folly, to conform to our artificial Regulations.
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Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
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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.
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One source of the sublime is infinity.
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Falsehood is a perennial spring.
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Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in almost every instrument which works upon the mind and curiosity blends itself, more or less, with all our pleasures.
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God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.
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Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
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