Edmund Burke

A great empire and little minds go ill together.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

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

Who can know her, and himself, and entertain much hope? Who can see and know such a creature, and not love her to distraction? She has all the softness that does not imply weakness... she is not made to be the admiration of everybody, but the happiness of one.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

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 appetite.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.

[Slavery] is a weed that grows in every soil.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.

A nation without means of reform is without means of survival.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.

The ocean is an object of no small terror.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

True humility-the basis of the Christian system-is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.