Quotes from Edmund Burke

Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny.

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

But a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition, to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

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.

The distinguishing part of our Constitution is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate seems the particular duty and proper trust of a member of the House of Commons. But the liberty, the only liberty, I mean is a liberty connected with order: that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.

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.

There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.

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.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

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

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

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