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I decline the election. It has ever been my rule through life, to observe a proportion between my efforts and my objects. I have never been remarkable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advantages that are personal to myself.

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
Life
Election
Bold
Rule
Observe
Advantage
Decline
Objects
Efforts
Personal
Remarkable
Effort
Proportion
Ever
Pursuit
Sanguine
Never
Active
Advantages

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The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.
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The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
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Over-taxation cost England her colonies of North America.
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Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.
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Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.
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To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.
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Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.
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The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.
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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.
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Applaud us when we run, Console us when we fall, Cheer us when we recover.
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It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.
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There are circumstances in which despair does not imply inactivity.
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Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.
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Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new compositions, any bungler can add to the old.
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I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
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Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because, of all enemies, it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.
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Public calamity is a mighty leveller.
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The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of his wisdom who made it.
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They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.
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My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
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