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Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

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
Cold
Fiction
Imagination
Truth
Unfruitful
Lags
Lag
Barren
Invention

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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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Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
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But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
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Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.
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To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.
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Never, no never, did Nature say one thing, and wisdom another.
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The march of the human mind is slow.
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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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It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
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I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.
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It is known that the taste--whatever it is--is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.
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A nation is not conquered which is perpetually to be conquered.
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There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well-protected pursuit.
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To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
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Religion is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by virtue.
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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.
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To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
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Public calamity is a mighty leveller.
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Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty.
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Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
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