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Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.Edmund Burke
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But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.Edmund Burke
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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (1794)]Edmund Burke
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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.Edmund Burke
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Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one.Edmund Burke
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The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.Edmund Burke
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No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.Edmund Burke
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It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.Edmund Burke
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Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.Edmund Burke
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Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.Edmund Burke
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Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.Edmund Burke
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The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.Edmund Burke
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People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.Edmund Burke
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It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.Edmund Burke
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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.Edmund Burke
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Society is indeed a contract.... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.Edmund Burke
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If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.Edmund Burke
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.Edmund Burke
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All That Is Needed For Evil To Succeeded, Is For Good People To Do NothingEdmund Burke
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All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.Edmund Burke
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Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.Edmund Burke
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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.Edmund Burke
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An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill. .Edmund Burke
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History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.Edmund Burke
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The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.Edmund Burke
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Our patience will achieve more than our force.Edmund Burke
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Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his /pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs/, --- and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, --- no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinions. .Edmund Burke
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The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. .Edmund Burke
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But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.Edmund Burke
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A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.Edmund Burke
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He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.Edmund Burke
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I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.Edmund Burke
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When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.Edmund Burke
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It is generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles and design.Edmund Burke
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A representative owes not just his industry but his judgementEdmund Burke
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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]Edmund Burke
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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of theEdmund Burke
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History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same –“troublous storms that toss The private state, and render life unsweet.” These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.Edmund Burke
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Ambition can creep as well as soar.Edmund Burke
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He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.Edmund Burke
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Adversity is a severe instructor.... He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.Edmund Burke
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Mere parsimony is not economy .. . expense and great expense may be an essential part of true economy.Edmund Burke
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Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.Edmund Burke
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All government - indeed every human benefit and enjoyment every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.Edmund Burke
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Never despair but if you do work on in despair.Edmund Burke
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No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.Edmund Burke
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No passion so effectively robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.Edmund Burke
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Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.Edmund Burke
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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.Edmund Burke
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I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tombs of the Capulets.Edmund Burke
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Custom reconciles us to everything.Edmund Burke
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History is a pact between the dead the living and the yet unborn.Edmund Burke
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We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.Edmund Burke
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The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.Edmund Burke
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The effect of liberty on individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.Edmund Burke
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The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.Edmund Burke
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By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.Edmund Burke
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You can never plan the future by the past.Edmund Burke
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There is a courageous wisdom there is also a false reptile prudence the result not of caution but of fear.Edmund Burke
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Queen of arts and daughter of heaven.Edmund Burke
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A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together would be my standard of a statesman.Edmund Burke
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Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgement and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.Edmund Burke
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Dangers by being despised grow great.Edmund Burke
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The writers against religion whilst they oppose every system are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.Edmund Burke
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A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival.Edmund Burke
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Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.Edmund Burke
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All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.Edmund Burke
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What shadows we are what shadows we pursue!Edmund Burke
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Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.Edmund Burke
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You cannot plan the future by the past.Edmund Burke
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Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.Edmund Burke
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Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.Edmund Burke
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War never leaves where it found a nation.Edmund Burke
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The wisdom of our ancestors.Edmund Burke
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A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words.Edmund Burke
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What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.Edmund Burke
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People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.Edmund Burke
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Good order is the foundation of all things.Edmund Burke
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Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.Edmund Burke
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There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations.Edmund Burke
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We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.Edmund Burke
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Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.Edmund Burke
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The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.Edmund Burke
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But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.Edmund Burke
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Beauty is the promise of happiness.Edmund Burke
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Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.Edmund Burke
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Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.Edmund Burke
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Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.Edmund Burke
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All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.Edmund Burke
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The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.Edmund Burke
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What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.Edmund Burke
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It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.Edmund Burke
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The traveller has reached the end of the journey!Edmund Burke
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Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.Edmund Burke
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There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination.Edmund Burke
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Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great empire and little minds go ill together.Edmund Burke
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Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.Edmund Burke
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All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.Edmund Burke
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If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.Edmund Burke
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To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.Edmund Burke