Edmund Burke

Strange incongruities must ever perplex those, who confound the unhappiness of civil dissensions with the crime of treason.

By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the …

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal …

Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act — is founded on compromise and barter.

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

The march of the human mind is slow.

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

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.

Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse …

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

Through a wise and salutary neglect [of the colonies], a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power …

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

When we speak of the commerce with our [American] colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

Young man, there is America — which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now …

The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.

I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

Falsehood has a perennial spring.