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Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty.

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
Extreme
Extremes
Duty
Told
Hear
Power
Men
Love

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
Edmund Burke
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To innovate is not to reform.
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It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin and about as valuable.
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By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
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Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
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An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.
Edmund Burke
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I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.
Edmund Burke
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The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies [synonyms] and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. Things never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes called agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess sometimes too continued an exercise of revolutionary power.
Edmund Burke
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It is the love of the people it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army 168 and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
Edmund Burke
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The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke
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Of this stamp is the cant of, Not men, but measures.
Edmund Burke
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Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.
Edmund Burke
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Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm.
Edmund Burke
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The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
Edmund Burke
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The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men to each govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.
Edmund Burke
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I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
Edmund Burke
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Guilt was never a rational thing it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.
Edmund Burke
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Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.
Edmund Burke
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Over-taxation cost England her colonies of North America.
Edmund Burke