Quote

Public calamity is a mighty leveller.

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
Mighty
Adversity
Public
Calamity

More quotes by Edmund Burke

Image
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Edmund Burke
Image
Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn.
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
A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
Edmund Burke
Image
If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
Edmund Burke
Image
History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.
Edmund Burke
Image
The question is not whether you have a right to render people miserable, but whether it is not in your best interest to make them happy.
Edmund Burke
Image
A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.
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
It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor.
Edmund Burke
Image
The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought that never wanders, the purpose that never wavers - these are the masters of victory.
Edmund Burke
Image
It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.
Edmund Burke
Image
Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman.
Edmund Burke
Image
And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
Edmund Burke
Image
Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.
Edmund Burke
Image
You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.
Edmund Burke
Image
The parties are the gamesters but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the winner in the end.
Edmund Burke
Image
A great empire and little minds go ill together.
Edmund Burke
Image
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
Edmund Burke
Image
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.
Edmund Burke