661 Quotes by Edmund Burke

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)]

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

All That Is Needed For Evil To Succeeded, Is For Good People To Do Nothing

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.