Edmund Burke

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

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

The public interest requires that the government should be as stable as the laws.

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

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species, it almost always acts right.

The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.

To innovate is not to reform.

The people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error, and not their crime.

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.

The love of lucre, though it is to be found in all communities, is not the ruling principle in any.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference, which is at least a tacit acknowledgment that all religions are equally good, or equally bad.

The greater part of the wisdom of life is to be found in the common sense of mankind.

The very essence of a good government consists in the due administration of justice.

It is not by the consolidation, or concentration, of powers, but by their distribution, that government can be rendered efficient for all the purposes for which government is instituted.

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.

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

The greater the man, the more he is subject to the accidents of life.

The revenue of the state is the state. In effect, all depends upon it, whether for support or for reformation.