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To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.

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
Prove
Value
Ought
Values
Freedom
Free
Deprecate
Obliged
Americans

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But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
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Whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.
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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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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
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Nnothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues.
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The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.
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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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Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.
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Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred.
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The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.
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A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
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It is by sympathy we enter into the concerns of others, that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy may be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.
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Those who attempt to level never equalize
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A nation is not conquered which is perpetually to be conquered.
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Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
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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.
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They [Americans] augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.
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It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.
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As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.
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In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
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