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Power, in whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on 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
Rarely
Guilty
Whatever
Hands
Power
Limitations
Strict
Limitation

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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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Responsibility prevents crimes.
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Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.
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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.
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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.
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A jealous lover lights his torch from the firebrand of the fiend.
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The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
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Of this stamp is the cant of, Not men, but measures.
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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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True humility-the basis of the Christian system-is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.
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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.
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It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly.
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There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times.
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Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
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Freedom without virtue is not freedom but license to pursue whatever passions prevail in the intemperate mind man's right to freedom being in exact proportion to his willingness to put chains upon his own appetites the less restraint from within, the more must be imposed from without.
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Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever
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To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.
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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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As mankind becomes more enlightened to know their real interests, they will esteem the value of agriculture they will find it in their natural--their destined occupation.
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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.
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