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This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.

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
Nature
Totally
Men
Forgotten
People
Theory
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Rights
Politics
Taken
Political
Theories

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
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I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.
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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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Applaud us when we run, Console us when we fall, Cheer us when we recover.
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Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.
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Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind.
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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.
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The grand instructor, time.
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Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
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Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
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He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
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Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred.
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Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.
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Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.
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Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.
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Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.
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Guilt was never a rational thing it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.
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No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.
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But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
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For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever
Edmund Burke