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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

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Edmund Burke
Age: 68 †
Born: 1729
Born: January 12
Died: 1797
Died: July 9
Philosopher
Politician
Statesman
Writer
Dublin city
Law
King
Though
Merely
Political
Kings
Execute
Order
Laws
Orders
Great
However
Executive
Office
Royal
Trust
Execution
Politics
Executives

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Power, in whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself.
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The march of the human mind is slow.
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No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.
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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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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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Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.
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Nothing so effectually deadens the taste of the sublime as that which is light and radiant.
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Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.
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My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
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Those who attempt to level never equalize
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Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
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If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
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The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.
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Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.
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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.
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The grand instructor, time.
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Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all it combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights but not to equal things.
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The wisdom of our ancestors.
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Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them.
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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.
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