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Government is the exercise of all the great qualities of the human mind.

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
Qualities
Exercise
Quality
Government
Human
Humans
Great
Mind

More quotes by Edmund Burke

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The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements-success.
Edmund Burke
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Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions any bungler can add to the old but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them?
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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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I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
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When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Edmund Burke
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Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.
Edmund Burke
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All virtue which is impracticable is spurious.
Edmund Burke
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In all forms of government the people is the true legislator.
Edmund Burke
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Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.
Edmund Burke
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He who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own and he who profits by a superior understanding raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior standing he unites with.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke
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He was not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.
Edmund Burke
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Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits.
Edmund Burke
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Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.
Edmund Burke
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To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
Edmund Burke
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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.
Edmund Burke
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They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.
Edmund Burke
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It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.
Edmund Burke
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History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.
Edmund Burke
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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Edmund Burke