Quote

The wisdom of our ancestors.

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
Ancestors
Ancestor
Wisdom

More quotes by Edmund Burke

Image
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
Image
It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
Edmund Burke
Image
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke
Image
Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
Edmund Burke
Image
To execute laws is a royal office to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.
Edmund Burke
Image
Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.
Edmund Burke
Image
A man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to choose his subject properly.... But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain to what would be reason and truth if asserted in China.
Edmund Burke
Image
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.
Edmund Burke
Image
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
Edmund Burke
Image
Contempt is not a thing to be despised. It may be borne with a calm and equal mind, but no man, by lifting his head high, can pretend that he does not perceive the scorns that are poured down on him from above.
Edmund Burke
Image
Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.
Edmund Burke
Image
Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves.
Edmund Burke
Image
If any ask me what a free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so,and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.
Edmund Burke
Image
In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters,--that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. This it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations.
Edmund Burke
Image
The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies [synonyms] and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. Things never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes called agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess sometimes too continued an exercise of revolutionary power.
Edmund Burke
Image
Not men but measures a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.
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
Hypocrisy is no cheap vice nor can our natural temper be masked for many years together.
Edmund Burke
Image
Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred.
Edmund Burke
Image
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.
Edmund Burke