All Quotes

"Mr. Burke assuredly possessed an understanding admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, an understanding stronger than that of any statesman, active or speculative, of the eighteenth century, stronger than every thing, except his own fierce and ungovernable sensibility. Hence he generally chose his side like a fanatic, and defended it like a philosopher."

"Hindostan, with its vast cities, its gorgeous pagodas, its infinite swarms of dusky population, its long descended dynasties, its stately etiquette, excited in a mind so capacious, so imaginative, and so susceptible, the most intense interest. The peculiarities of the costume, of the manners, and of the laws, the very mystery which hung over the language and origin of the people, seized his imagination. To plead under the ancient arches of Westminster Hall, in the name of the English people, at the bar of the English nobles, for great nations and kings separated from him by half the world, seemed to him the height of human glory."

"I have now finished reading again most of Burke's works. Admirable! The greatest man since Milton."

"Burke is one of those extraordinary contradictions which could only have been produced in England. He was an almost fanatical believer in justice and good government, and his sympathies went beyond his own country; they embraced humanity at large. But he was passionately attached to the order of things as then existing. He fondled error and fostered paradox until he came to be the defender of rotten boroughs and close corporations. His “Reflections on the French Revolution” had probably a greater influence on English history than any other pamphlet or piece of writing. They marked a turn in the tide; then came the September Massacres and the execution of the king. A cry of horror arose in England, and Burke's voice rose higher. “This,” men cried, “is the end of Reform! Are we, too, to drift to the same end—the same excesses?” The propertied classes, the Church, everyone who had anything to lose, declaimed against the Revolution, and the cause of Reform was postponed for forty years."

"Of Burke he spoke with rapture, declaring that he was in, in his estimation, without any parallel in any age or country, except, perhaps, Lord Bacon and Cicero; that his works contained an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than could be found in any other writer whatever."

"Burke...is held by every party in England as the paragon of British statesmen."

"The sycophant — who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy — was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois."

"His Reflections were written in 1790, before there had been any degeneration in the moral fervours of the politicians in Paris, while Louis XVI still reigned and Robespierre was unheard of; and it was the arrival of the dooms Burke had prophesied that made him a major figure of his time. He spent the best part of the decade in a kind of mental thunderstorm, ending it with a plea that the place of his burial should be kept secret, lest vindictive democrats dug up his bones for desecration. On the whole, whatever the merit of these ringing arguments, his influence was bad. His opinions on the horrors of social revolution, and on the impropriety of any change at all, became the commonplaces of dinner-tables, and both the ethos and the methods of the landowners of England hardened accordingly."

"My theme is the cultural struggle between the idea of a process, and that of a starting point... This cultural struggle is found at its liveliest in the field of politics, and one of its particular skirmishes is Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The issue raised by that book may be simplified into the question: is revolution or tradition the idea by which the process of politics may be best understood? Burke was confronted by a body of men who sought in every possible way to create an unbridgeable gap between the ancien régime and the new order being unfolded in France during the 1790s. They renamed streets and months, abolished the historic provinces of France, and set up temples for the new cults they espoused. Burke argued that this was both unwise and impossible, insisting on the ubiquity of tradition in a manner similar to that in which he had previously insisted upon the ubiquity of law in the case of Warren Hastings. We are all, Burke argued, the products of tradition, and the illusion that we can escape from our past is entirely crippling. The melodramatic turbulence with which men attempted to break out of their pasts appeared merely as a colossal folly."

"The distinction between nature and artifice belongs to the philosophy of the Enlightenment... Burke recognised this point, and met it head on by insisting that artifice was human nature. "We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected..." Indeed, in prefacing these rhetorical remarks with "We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity" he attempted to reverse the criteria of nature and artifice, so that it was the revolutionaries who appeared corrupt and artificial."

"But what a mind was Burke's! Macaulay was right, the greatest mind since Milton."

"He is a great theme. What a mind! His fame grows greater with time. Macaulay was right when he said of certain passages, “How divine!” Who can compare with him? Taine? Tocqueville? No."

"The greatest, most profound, mightiest and most human of all statesmen of all times and of all nations...I say it with pride, he belongs more to us than to the British. I glory in the fact that my own ideas of the State...are hopeful children of his mind. He is recognized in Germany as the most influential and happiest mediator, between separation and unity of powers and of labor, between the principles of nobility and that of the bourgeoisie, and thus, no matter how influential his deeds may have been for Great Britain, his glory belongs to the German sphere."

"Burke squarely contended that party-divisions were, for good or evil, "things inseparable from free government"; and in his well-known eulogy of party as a union of men endeavouring to promote the national interest on a common principle, gave a forecast of parliamentary government. Men so connected, he wrote, must strive "to carry their common plan into execution with all the power and authority of the State"; in forming an administration give "their party preference in all things"; and not "accept any offers of power in which the whole body is not included". While professing adherence to the Revolution Settlement, by implication he eliminated the rights of the Crown, and obliquely argued that in fact the royal executive had ceased to exist, replaced by the monstrous contraption of a cabal set on separating "the Court from Administration". The "double Cabinet", a product of Burke's fertile, disordered, and malignant imagination, long bedevilled his own party and their spiritual descendants."

"Burke [has] the palm of political prophecy."

"I return Burke's letter, which is like other rhapsodies from the same pen, in which there is much to admire, and nothing to agree with."

"We consider that our especial commendation and the testimony of our heart may be justly claimed by those who, in this time of apostasy and impiety, have exerted the force of their genius that they might write in defence of the cause of right... Amongst them you have stood out as one of the foremost, in that you have composed a famous work to overthrow and utterly destroy the fictions of the new philosophers of France, and have exhorted your fellow country-men...to show indulgences to Catholics born in the realm of Great Britain... [T]herefore it is our wish that you should accept with joyful and cheerful heart our congratulations and praises, which have this especial object—that you should more and more exert yourself to protect the cause of civilization."

"Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was an ardent proponent of the idea that there is decisive wisdom in the ways of a people. No one can mistake Burke for a partisan of populist democracy. Quite the contrary, he was a defender of a well-structured society, where customs and traditions are respected, and religious institutions play an undeniable role in preserving a wealthy society. There is something almost mystical in the ability of a people to wisely pursue initiatives, grounded in a deep respect for the spiritual meaning of existence, for the sake of the public good. Institutions should recognize this and collaborate with citizens for a better world. This is Burke’s perspective, and I am sure that Dr. Hong [Tao-Tze, grandmaster of the Taijimen qigong menpai,] would subscribe to it, adding that the pivotal instrument here is human conscience."

"Ever since 1953, when Russell Kirk produced its intellectual coat of arms, conservatism has been "what Edmund Burke wrote." This is the equivalent of Arthur Danto's institutional theory of art — art is whatever the art world says it is. But it's also a cop-out. Instead of analyzing conservatism in an Aristotelian way, instead of asking how we use the term in real life, we just describe Burke. In the process, don't we risk fleeing into what Tanenhaus calls an "alternative universe"? If conservatives are "glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America," as Tanenhaus says, why is the solution to be more like a man who wore a powdered wig? Liberals have problems of their own, but, to their credit, they don't sit around debating whether Hillary Clinton or John Edwards is the "real Rousseauian.""

"Chivalry for Burke reverses the all-too-human tendency to believe that "might makes right." Chivalry requires the powerful—those capable of inspiring others with the fear of death, terror, and the other aspects of the sublime—to subordinate their power to the interests and needs of the weak."

"In 1756 Edmund Burke published his first work: Vindication of Natural Society. Curiously enough it has been almost completely ignored in the current Burke revival. This work contrasts sharply with Burke's other writings, for it is hardly in keeping with the current image of the Father of the New Conservatism. A less conservative work could hardly be imagined; in fact, Burke's Vindication was perhaps the first modern expression of rationalistic and individualistic anarchism. ... "Anarchism" is an extreme term, but no other can adequately describe Burke's thesis. Again and again, he emphatically denounces any and all government, and not just specific forms of government... All government, Burke adds, is founded on one "grand error." It was observed that men sometimes commit violence against one another, and that it is therefore necessary to guard against such violence. As a result, men appoint governors among them. But who is to defend the people against the governors? ... The anarchism of Burke's Vindication is negative, rather than positive. It consists of an attack on the State rather than a positive blueprint of the type of society which Burke would regard as ideal. Consequently, both the communist and the individualist wings of anarchism have drawn sustenance from this work."

"Mr. Burke has made himself very considerable. He is the most ingenious debater I ever heard, and at least as strong in the reply as in the opening."

"As the prophets of international peace and understanding sang hymns to the coming universal communion of humanity, Burke thundered back, in effect: Nature! I'll tell you about Nature. You imagine it's all the same, daisychains and hands across the seas and songs of fraternity. But what you're talking about is the brotherhood of intellectuals who sip from the same little cups of chocolate, chatter away the same clichés and dream the same puerile dream. But nature, my friends, is lived, not thought. Nature is familiarity, a feeling for place. Nature is a patriot."

"In Burke's eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke's view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on. I was more exhilarated by those ideas than by anything else in Burke, since they seemed to explain with the utmost clarity the dim intuitions that I had had in 1968, as I watched the riots from my window... In those deft, cool thoughts, Burke summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for liberation, all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in the future that has dominated and perverted modern politics."

"The wise policy is to accept the arrangements, however imperfect, that have evolved through custom and inheritance, to improve them by small adjustments, but not to jeopardise them by large-scale alterations the consequences of which nobody can really envisage. The case for this approach was unanswerably set before us by Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, and subsequent history has repeatedly confirmed his view of things. The lesson that we should draw, therefore, is that since the nation state has proved to be a stable foundation of democratic government and secular jurisdiction, we ought to improve it, adjust it, even to dilute it, but not to throw it away."

"To put Burke's point in a modern idiom somewhat removed from his own majestic periods: the knowledge that we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions, and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it."

"The conservative icon Edmund Burke complained that the French Revolution was unlike others because it had been led by "Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils"...From antiquity to the modern era, Jews have proven tremendously useful as an external enemy, or as a scapegoat for society's ills."

"A story was told me by the late Earl Grey relating to himself and Mr. Burke. Lord Grey told me that on one occasion when in the House of Commons, as Mr. Grey, he had been speaking with considerable force of language and greater vehemence of tone than some persons might have thought seemly. On resuming his seat, he said to Mr. Burke, “I hope I have not shown much temper.” “Temper!” replied Mr. Burke, “temper, sir, is the state of mind suited to the occasion!”"

"The sublime is particularly important as an aesthetic of the terrifying, which at a small remove is fascinating: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature," writes Edmund Burke in his seminal treatise on the sublime, "is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.""

"Burke argued that all the nations of Europe had evolved from some fusion of Roman law, Christian morality, and Teutonic customs and manners, and that this complex of nations constituted a "commonwealth of Europe," the product of slow historical development over many centuries. Burke did not believe that history, as "the known march of the ordinary providence of God," contained any law of necessary progress, but he did believe that improvements in the civil-social life of the Europeans could and did continue to occur. He regarded all the basic institutions of society—family, church, state, schools, guilds, commercial organizations—all corporate bodies, as the necessary instrumental means for the full development of human nature in its spiritual and temporal dimensions. All such institutions were "natural"; that is, normal for man, the product of his will and reason, created artfully for his improvement. Burke summarized his defense of the institutions of civilization in an epigram: "Art is man's nature.""

"He speaks from the relative stability of the eighteenth century against the first signs of the flux and confusion of the nineteenth century, but he speaks also against those rising doctrines which the eighteenth century had produced, and which were to become the characteristic philosophy of the change itself. In doing so, he prepared a position in the English mind from which the march of industrialism and liberalism was to be continually attacked. He established the idea of the State as the necessary agent of human perfection, and in terms of this idea the aggressive individualism of the nineteenth century was bound to be condemned. He established, further, the idea of what has been called an "organic society", where the emphasis is on the interrelation and continuity of human activities, rather than on separation into spheres of interest, each governed by its own laws."

""We cannot, I fear," he says proudly of the colonies, "we cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery." Does not your blood stir at these passages? And is it not because, besides loving what is nobly written, you feel that every word strikes towards the heart of the things that have made your blood what it has proved to be in the history of our race?"

"[T]he things he hated are truly hateful. He hated the French revolutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for free men. And that philosophy is in fact radically evil and corrupting. No state can ever be conducted on its principles. For it holds that government is a matter of contract and deliberate arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of habit, bound together by innumerable threads of association, scarcely one of which has been deliberately placed. It holds that the object of government is liberty, whereas the true object of government is justice; not the advantage of one class, even though that class constitute the majority, but right equity in the adjustment of the interests of all classes. It assumes that government can be made over at will, but assumes it without the slightest historical foundation. For governments have never been successfully and permanently changed except by slow modification operating from generation to generation. It contradicted every principle that had been so laboriously brought to light in the slow stages of the growth of liberty in the only land in which liberty had then grown to great proportions. The history of England is a continuous thesis against revolution; and Burke would have been no true Englishman, had he not roused himself, even fanatically, if there were need, to keep such puerile doctrine out."

"He was applying the same principles to the case of France and to the case of India that he had applied to the case of the colonies. He meant to save the empire, not by changing its constitution, as was the method in France, and so shaking every foundation in order to dislodge an abuse, but by administering it uprightly and in a liberal spirit. He was persuaded "that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Our business," he said, "was to rule, not to wrangle; and it would be a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a dispute, whilst we had lost an empire." The monarchy must be saved and the constitution vindicated by keeping the empire pure in all parts, even in the remotest provinces. Hastings must be crushed in order that the world might know that no English governor could afford to be unjust. Good government, like all virtue, he deemed to be a practical habit of conduct, and not a matter of constitutional structure. It is a great ideal, a thoroughly English ideal; and it constitutes the leading thought of all Burke's career."

"[Burke was] the most sagacious Politician of his age... Time has verified his predictions."

"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience."

"We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time."

"Let us not foist this humbug on the world."

"All my moves were designed to promote the happiness and wellbeing of my family, rather than fame."

"I know that in my public life I fell below the standards that I had set myself... I have seen what is wrong but not done enough to put it right. I have been more critical than correct. I have had opportunities of great positions in the service of the state, but I have put them aside. I know that I have not devoted myself enough to promoting the good of others."

"I feel that I've had a happy life, not a very useful life, but a happy one."

"Getting up and criticising the other fellow because he's in and you are not seems to me a futile waste of time. Especially as you know in your heart that you would be doing more or less the same thing if you were in his place."

"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."

"I was going to have an opening statement, but I decided that what I was going to say I wanted to get a lot of attention, so I'm going to wait and leak it."

"Every country and every people has a stake in the Afghan resistance, for the freedom fighters of Afghanistan are defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability."

"Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means."

"I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day."

"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy.""

"God made all his creations in different colors. It would be pretty boring if we all looked the same."

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."