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It is undoubtedly the business of ministers very much to consult the inclinations of the people, but they ought to take great care that they do not receive that inclination from the few persons who may happen to approach them.
-Edmund Burke
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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.
-Edmund Burke
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If any ask me what a free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so,and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.
-Edmund Burke
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There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.
-Edmund Burke
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What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence.
-Edmund Burke
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Education is the cheap defence of nations.
-Edmund Burke
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Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
-Edmund Burke
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I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
-Edmund Burke
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Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs,and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure,no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. 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.
-Edmund Burke
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Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.
-Edmund Burke
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I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
-Edmund Burke
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To please universally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
-Edmund Burke
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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.
-Edmund Burke
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Society is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
-Edmund Burke
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Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.
-Edmund Burke
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A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.
-Edmund Burke
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Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of the necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degenerate spirits. It is an erect countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind.
-Edmund Burke
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The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
-Edmund Burke
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That the greatest security of the people, against the encroachments and usurpations of their superiors, is to keep the Spirit of Liberty constantly awake, is an undeniable truth.
-Edmund Burke
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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.
-Edmund Burke
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I did not obey your instructions. No. I conformed to the instructions of truth and Nature, and maintained your interest, against your opinions, with a constancy that became me. A representative worthy of you ought to be a person of stability. I am to look, indeed, to your opinions,but to such opinions as you and I must have five years hence. I was not to look to the flash of the day. I knew that you chose me, in my place, along with others, to be a pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of every fashionable gale.
-Edmund Burke
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Ambition
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Ambition can creep as well as soar.
-Edmund Burke
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America
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A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
-Edmund Burke
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Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners.
-Edmund Burke
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Aristocracy
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Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
-Edmund Burke
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Books by and about Edmund Burke