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Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.

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
Men
Vice
Powers
Vices
Standing
Duty
Public
Makes
Mind
Withers

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The parties are the gamesters but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the winner in the end.
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Thank God, men that art greatly guilty are never wise.
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Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
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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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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.
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Falsehood is a perennial spring.
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A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.
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The ocean is an object of no small terror.
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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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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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I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pain of others
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The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.
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And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
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The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
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Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
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In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
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To innovate is not to reform.
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There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
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They [Americans] augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.
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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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