661 Quotes by Edmund Burke

Education is a nation's cheapest defence

There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.

The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of the wisdom of Him who made it.

Who can know her, and himself, and entertain much hope? Who can see and know such a creature, and not love her to distraction? She has all the softness that does not imply weakness... she is not made to be the admiration of everybody, but the happiness of one.

To reach the height of our ambition is like trying to reach the rainbow; as we advance it recedes.

Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

"War," says Machiavelli, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans. "A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

The most favourable laws can do very little towards the happiness of people when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them.