A great empire and little minds go ill together.
Edmund BurkeRead
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
Interpretation
Progress and cooperation in society require compromise.
Edmund Burke's quote emphasizes the foundational role that compromise plays in the functioning of government and society. He suggests that all human achievements and virtues arise from the ability to negotiate and make concessions, indicating that true benefits and enjoyment in life stem from a balance of differing perspectives and a willingness to engage in give-and-take.
In practice
Use this quote at a political debate to highlight the importance of reaching across the aisle for effective governance.
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.
The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an individual weight of calumny will be super-added.
We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
What is done out of love always occurs beyond good and evil.
Men do not mirror themselves in running water - they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things.
This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
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