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Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.

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
Men
Benefit
Reasonable
Conservative
Benefits
Right

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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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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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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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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The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
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It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.
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Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.
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I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
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To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.
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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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When slavery is established in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.
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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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Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order.
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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.
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It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observations of time and place and of decency in general, that what is called taste by way of distinction consists and which is in reality no other than a more refined judgment.
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Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Edmund Burke
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God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.
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Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.
Edmund Burke
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Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
Edmund Burke
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The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality.
Edmund Burke