Edmund Burke

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

You had all the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. Your nobility was not adverse to all reformation. Your clergy was competent to all the functions of its institution. You possessed a noble and venerable castle — the accumulated structure of centuries. You might have repaired it. You might have built upon those old...

Society is indeed a contract. But it is not a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, to be dissolved at the whim of the parties. It is a partnership in all science, in all art, in every virtue, and in all perfection; a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Prejudice does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. It renders virtue habitual. We do not begin the world anew every morning; we inherit judgments because no single life is long enough to test all things from the beginning.

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections. The love of country is not born as an abstraction. It begins in neighborhoods, families, professions, parishes, and remembered obligations.

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

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

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 risque congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment, we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly,...

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.