Quote

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

Edmund Burke

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edmund Burke
Age: 68 †
Born: 1729
Born: January 12
Died: 1797
Died: July 9
Philosopher
Politician
Statesman
Writer
Dublin city
Upon
Virtuous
Less
Appetite
Cannot
Somewhere
Power
Exist
Without
Unless
Must
Liberty
Within
Controlling
Society
Placed

More quotes by Edmund Burke

Image
Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.
Edmund Burke
Image
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
Edmund Burke
Image
Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn.
Edmund Burke
Image
There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well-protected pursuit.
Edmund Burke
Image
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
Image
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?
Edmund Burke
Image
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
Image
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.
Edmund Burke
Image
Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
Edmund Burke
Image
What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.
Edmund Burke
Image
War is the matter which fills all history and consequently the only, or almost the only, view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape: and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.
Edmund Burke
Image
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Edmund Burke
Image
Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and a higher economy. Economy is a distinctive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection.
Edmund Burke
Image
The wisdom of our ancestors.
Edmund Burke
Image
Woman is not made to be the admiration of everybody , but the happiness of one.
Edmund Burke
Image
You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.
Edmund Burke
Image
It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.
Edmund Burke
Image
No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.
Edmund Burke
Image
They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.
Edmund Burke
Image
Humanity cannot be degraded by humiliation.
Edmund Burke