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An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.

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
Oppression
Extremes
Arms
Sure
Everything
Rigor

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Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.
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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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Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
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Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.
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Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.
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God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.
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It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical,--but, in general, those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults are unqualified for the work of reformation.
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But a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition, to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.
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A nation without means of reform is without means of survival.
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Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
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Though ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness for it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness for any use.
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An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
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Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
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It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
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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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There are circumstances in which despair does not imply inactivity.
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Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.
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To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.
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Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage.
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Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.
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