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The question is not whether you have a right to render people miserable, but whether it is not in your best interest to make them happy.

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
Interest
Whether
Happy
Best
Right
Make
Render
People
Miserable
Question

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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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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The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous excess, a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all States.
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Not men but measures a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.
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The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
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A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
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It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
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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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Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
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An appearance of delicacy, and even fragility, is almost essential to beauty.
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The most favourable laws can do very little towards the happiness of people when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them.
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Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
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It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.
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It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
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Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.
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A nation without means of reform is without means of survival.
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The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
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Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told their duty.
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The march of the human mind is slow.
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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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Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.
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