661 Quotes by Edmund Burke

It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical,--but, in general, those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults are unqualified for the work of reformation.

A man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to choose his subject properly.... But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain to what would be reason and truth if asserted in China.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.

A state without some means of change is without the means of its conservation

Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.

Equity money is dynamic and debt money is static.

Some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolite

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.