Famous Quotes by Edmund Burke

Below are famous quotes by Edmund Burke - Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797).

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny.

Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises; for never intending to go beyond promises; it costs nothing.

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.

It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives.

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

Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

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

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

You can never plan the future by the past.

Return to authors.