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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

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Edmund Burke
Age: 68 †
Born: 1729
Born: January 12
Died: 1797
Died: July 9
Philosopher
Politician
Statesman
Writer
Dublin city
May
Informing
Little
Exact
Thing
Definition
Way
Definitions
Defined
Towards
Nature
Littles

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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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.
Edmund Burke
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Ambition can creep as well as soar.
Edmund Burke
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Never, no never, did Nature say one thing, and wisdom another.
Edmund Burke
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The very name of a politician, a statesman, is sure to cause terror and hatred it has always connected with it the ideas of treachery, cruelty, fraud, and tyranny.
Edmund Burke
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The only training for the heroic is the mundane.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke
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Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
Edmund Burke
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Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.
Edmund Burke
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A nation without means of reform is without means of survival.
Edmund Burke
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Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in almost every instrument which works upon the mind and curiosity blends itself, more or less, with all our pleasures.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke
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Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
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The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.
Edmund Burke
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All the forces of darkness need to succeed ... is for the people to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
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Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
Edmund Burke
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A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
Edmund Burke
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It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.
Edmund Burke
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Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.
Edmund Burke
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History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.
Edmund Burke
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One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Edmund Burke