Quote

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.

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
World
Cannot
Exist
Attempt
Better
Objects
Gain
Without
Loss
Object
Whole
Virtue
Instruments
Even
Liberty
Gains
Much
Humanity
Machines
Make
Free
Leaving
Benevolence
Men
Political
Mere
Cherish

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
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The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
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Thank God, men that art greatly guilty are never wise.
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The marketplace obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success.
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The superfluities of a rich nation furnish a better object of trade than the necessities of a poor one. It is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.
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The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement not to compound with our Condition but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.
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Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
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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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The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
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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.
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The grand instructor, time.
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To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.
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Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.
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To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil.
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There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
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Nothing is so rash as fear and the counsels of pusillanimity very rarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate, the evils from which they would fly.
Edmund Burke
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Those who attempt to level never equalize
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And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
Edmund Burke
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It is the love of the people it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army 168 and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
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By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
Edmund Burke