Anglicans

"Burke saw beyond his own age to a view of colonial policy, the significance of which we are only just beginning to apply... He saw clearly the moral vice of predatory imperialism, and he stood by his principles in the face of obloquy, indifference and neglect. He made a lonely and impressive protest against the hypocrisy of those who think that the superior abilities of the white man justify a policy towards the native races of oppression and rapacity and corruption as long as profits can be extorted from their misery."

"[Burke's thought was] permeated by a power of compassion and a fund of common sense both of which are beyond all praise... [His capacity of mind gave] forth a radiant light... [He was] a lovable, not less than a remarkable man... [There was] no atom of malice in his (Burke's) disposition...he never gave way to envy or jealousy. He was never petty minded... with all his faults, he was in every sense of the word, a very great man."

"Burke who with ample defects has a moral insight into men and institutions I believe to be unsurpassed."

"His goods are all in the present—peace and quiet, friendship and affections, family life and those small acts of charity whereby one individual may sometimes help his fellows. He does not think of the race as marching through blood and fire to great and glorious goods in the distant future; there is, for him, no great political millennium to be helped and forwarded by present effort and present sacrifice ... This may not be the right attitude of mind. But whether or not the great political ideals which have inspired men in the past are madness and delusion they have provided a more powerful motive force than anything which Burke has to offer ... For all his passions and speech-making, it is the academic reasoner and philosopher who offers us these carefully guarded and qualified precepts, not the leader of men. Statesmen must learn wisdom in the school of Burke; if they wish to put it to great and difficult purpose, the essentials of leadership they must seek elsewhere."

"You could not stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen."

"It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man. Of all the persons of this description that I have ever known, I never met with above one or two who would make this concession; whether it was that party feelings ran too high to admit of any real candour, or whether it was owing to an essential vulgarity in their habits of thinking, they all seemed to be of opinion that he was a wild enthusiast, or a hollow sophist, who was to be answered by bits of facts, by smart logic, by shrewd questions, and idle songs. They looked upon him as a man of disordered intellects, because he reasoned in a style to which they had not been used, and which confounded their dim preceptions."

"Reflections on the Revolution in France is the application of Burke's principles to a concrete case. The case was a violation of his condition of civilisation. In the slogan of égalité he read not merely the end of privilege at law but chiefly the end of the inequalities in religion and society which he understood to be the bases of improvement. For the National Assembly was unfitted to govern and would do the work of two subversive groups... One was men of commerce, whom the peculiarities of the French polity had prevented from bringing their wealth to rest in land. Since their ambition for a leading role in society could find no place in the existing order, they were open to suggestions for an alternative. The alternative was supplied by the other group, which consisted of men of letters. They were deists and hated God's order. All combined to attack inequality, social and religious, whether the aristocracy and monarchy or the Church. These institutions had been the source of everything in society that Burke upheld. For him the Revolution, in a word, was the destruction of the proper order of things."

"We find in Burke the view that revelation was authentic. Related to this are a series of opinions about nature, which share the common term that nature does not treat people in the same way but instead makes distinctions between them. In Burke's view, nature founded inequality in society. Inequality of this sort was also a condition of improvement. He located examples of improvement under the aegis of the bearers of inequality, the aristocracy and the church. Improvement was necessary to bring man's nature to the highest pitch: in that sense nature lay in the perfection of an unequal order... He argued that human nature, as constructed by God, encouraged some to lead and others to follow, for the passions of ambition and imitation disposed men in this way. Hence inequality in society was authorised by nature. This arrangement was beneficial, he thought, because it produced both social cohesion (through imitation) and improvement (through ambition)."

"Burke's last writings, especially in the awesome Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), project an apocalyptic, nightmare vision of lawless, relentless power, a horrible inversion of the hitherto 'natural' order in civilised states. Here coercion dispenses with allegiance... [T]he Regicide Peace...signals with prophetic accuracy the arrival of a new era in politics. Burke's horrified imaginings were realised to the letter in the slave-states of the 20th century."

"When Burke is at his best, as for instance in the Letter to a Noble Lord of 1796, it is difficult to admit that any one has ever excelled him in the melody of his sentences, the magnificence of his invective, the trumpet-blast of his sonorous declamation."

"I gradually became at Oxford a hard worker and read Rousseau's Contrat Social which had no influence upon me, and the writings of Burke which had a great deal. I remember heartily assenting to the observation of a good and clever undergraduate friend, a Thornton, when he said “I want no Toryism beyond that of Burke”. But I was thus as completely under his mastery with regard to the French Revolution as he was (I think) under the influence of a thoroughly one-sided view of French history: while his views of reform in Parliament, in combination with those of Mr. Canning, formed a most dangerous preparation for the coming crisis in the history of my ideas."

"December 18.—Read Burke; what a magazine of wisdom on Ireland and America. January 9.—Made many extracts from Burke—sometimes almost divine."

"Burke's book is a most admirable medication against the French disease, which has made too much progress even in this happy country. I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can even forgive his superstition."

"I know that there is no Man who calls himself a Gentleman that must not think himself obliged to you, for you have supported the cause of the Gentlemen."

"[I]n characteristic nationalist fashion, Burke assures his readers that the English constitution he is describing, perhaps partly inventing, has its roots deep in the past. English liberties are not a new invention but have been the central concern of the English constitution from time immemorial. The continuity over time that characterizes English history and its constitution is not simply a formal or legal one. Burke figures England as a huge family which extends across time as well as space... Families are held together in the present through bonds of blood, love, and property relations, and to the past through memory and inherited property. Burke imagines the English nation as being locked together through analogous ties and affections... Burke is here engaged in consecrating the nation through a kind of ancestor worship. He is also seeking to make the English aristocracy appear to be the custodians of the national family heritage rather than being alien to the national tradition (as radical nationalism asserted)."

"Feeling and providing as an "Englishman," Burke works continually to protect the English national character from the plague of revolutionary France... [For Burke] English feelings remain native and natural; they ensure maintenance of "liberal and manly morals"; and the reverence of the English for God, kings, parliaments, magistrates, priests, and nobility is not a slavery, as the radicals would have it, but the basis of their fitness for "rational liberty". The English national character finds its authentic expression and counterpart in the English constitution... For the English, then, to remain loyal to their constitution is to remain true to their essential national character."

"The writings of Burke, an Irish émigré, stand at the fountainhead of the quintessentially English "Culture and Society" tradition, which was to develop his concern with "organic" relations between human beings, and his scorn for a mean-spirited utilitarianism, into a resourceful critique of industrial capitalism. This is not, need one say, to claim this eighteenth-century Whig as a closet Marxist. But few things could be more of an affront to his values than the neo-liberalism of our own day, in which an abstract, universal drive for profit threatens much of what he held dear: the cultural needs of particular communities, the importance of human affections and customary bonds, the sense of history as a living process, the rootedness of men and women in particular places, the preciousness of that which cannot be bought or sold. Modern-day market forces, with their uprooting of whole communities, their severing of traditional bonds, their bogus universalism, their contractual view of society and eradication of history represent in Burkean terms, a virulent new strain of Jacobinism, even if the abstract dogmas in question are now those of Brussels bankers rather than French philosophes. The terms in which Burke censures the French revolutionaries of his time apply with striking specificity to the apologists for the global market-place today."

"Burke's writings in the 1790s were an attack, made before they had prevailed, on almost all the assumptions that dominate public discussion in the modern world. The attack was made from mixed motives in a political context but is not for that reason less useful in demonstrating that what has been held up for conservation by even the most Conservative of thinkers since Burke has been the Jacobinism that Burke attacked, and that Burke's importance for present purposes lies not in his counter-revolutionary politics but in the fact that it was he who made the most striking statement of the religious problem... [I]n defending the ancien régime he was led into affirming of Christianity what he had affirmed of religion in writing A Vindication of Natural Society, of Roman Catholicism in writing about Ireland and of Islam and Hinduism in writing about India – that it was crucial to it. Having come to demand a British effort to re-establish Christianity in France, he so far transcended Anglican assumptions as to make Pitt's central duty the use of force to ensure its re-establishment in Europe."

"Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer."

"At least five separate rebellions against authority can be cited as meeting with Burke’s specific approval—the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American War of Independence, the struggle of the Corsicans for freedom, the attempt of the Poles to preserve their national independence, and the various revolts against the minions of Warren Hastings in India. There are certain features common to all these. Each was the rising of practically a whole community under the leadership of its governing classes in defence of what were claimed to be ancient liberties against violent innovation, and no approval of revolution in other circumstances should be read into them. Even so, if there is any general theory behind these instances, we are a long way on the road to a theory of national self-determination."

"Mr. Burke—no mean authority—published a book on the French Revolution, almost every sentence of which, however canvassed and disputed at the time, has been justified by the course of subsequent events; and almost every prophecy has been strictly fulfilled."

"Burke's last works and words [are] still the manual of my politics."

"From first to last he [Lord Acton] seems to have recognised that, behind this whole aspect of the historical movement, there stands the figure of Edmund Burke; and if, in his youth he found Burke the ideal political teacher (especially for a Catholic) and the ideal expositor of the British constitution, he was equally prepared to say that "he would have been the first of our historians". The student of the history of historiography who reads Burke's early work entitled The Abridgement of English History can hardly fail to realise the significance it possesses in view of its place in the chronological series; and it is doubtful whether the student of the general thought of Burke has paid sufficient attention to this work, when one considers to what a degree the historical views which it embodies must actually entail the characteristic features of the man's political outlook."

"[I]t was Edmund Burke who—having recovered contact with the historical achievements of Restoration England—exerted the presiding influence over the historical movement of the nineteenth century."

"Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the first classic of the counter-revolution, is among other things a polemic against intellectuals: it claims that it is presumptuous for individuals to seek through reason to challenge the state, a mystic organism symbolised by the domestic hearth as well as the throne and the altar. The radical intellectual becomes a bogey-man... The Burkean positives are family affections and loyalties, hearth and home; hence, by extension, the greater family made by the nation, a hierarchy with the king at its head; and continuity with the past, especially with the inherited creed which it is the Church's business to preserve. Against this imaginative concept of an organic nation, Burke is able to depict as puny and unwholesome the intellectuals, French and English, who want to change the fabric or body of the state: he is in effect anti-individualist and anti-rationalist."

"I own myself entirely of Mrs. Montagu's opinion about Mr. Burke's book; it is the noblest, deepest, most animated, and exalted work that I think I have ever read."

"He looked, indeed, as if he had no wish but to diffuse philanthropy, pleasure, and genial gaiety all around. His figure, when he is not negligent in his carriage, is noble; his air, commanding; his address, graceful; his voice clear, penetrating, sonorous, and powerful; his language, copious, eloquent, and changefully impressive; his manners are attractive; his conversation is past all praise!"

"For nearly the whole period during which he survived the commencement of the revolution,—for five of those seven years,—all his predictions, save one momentary expression, had been more than fulfilled: anarchy and bloodshed had borne sway in France; conquest and convulsion had desolated Europe... The providence of mortals is not often able to penetrate so far as this into futurity."

"For Burke, conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical and practical-political weapon, not a set of principles. Burke is, I think, best understood as and is useful and worth reading precisely because he is not Oakeshott: Burke is Whig measures in Tory guise."

"Burke insists throughout his antirevolutionary works that the Revolution is unprecedented in its oppressive scope, its militarization of society, and its hostile, interventionist nature... He describes the nationalization of the country into a war economy, the state's intrusive regimentation of individual life, and its promotion of an "armed doctrine"—a hostile, alien ideology that propels invading Jacobin armies into Europe's Christian commonwealths. Whether Burke was right or wrong, whether he was prescient, lucky, or an inspired exaggerator, his analyses of revolutionary France approximate what is suggested by the adjective "totalitarian"."

"In Burke's thinking, the hierarchic links lead man from his "littlest platoon"—his family and place in his community—to his larger place in his country, uniting him with the connecting links of European civilization and ultimately with the Logos. He believed that attachment to our littlest platoon connects us to larger battalions of existence, uniting us with all that makes us fully human."

"Burke was not antirevolutionary per se: he defended a people's right to revolution, albeit as a last resort, when possibilities were exhausted and reformation circumvented... Burke was, throughout his life, a consistent opponent of oppression in multitudinous forms, and he was a consistent defender of the oppressed... His generosity toward the poor is still proverbial in Beaconsfield, where an anecdote still circulates about his cook's complaint that Burke had given the evening meal (a side of beef) to a hungry man. In England, he defended the right of religious dissenters to practice their own religion privately (not, however, those he believed were trying to subvert the English constitution), and he defended homosexuals from social persecution (they could be prosecuted and pilloried). In addition, he...drew up a plan for the eventual abolition of the slave trade... He also supported the Americans in their remonstrances against exorbitant British interference...and he opposed Protestant oppression of Catholics in Ireland and the exploitation of the people of India by the East India Company. None of these was a popular position identified with the status quo; in fact, if Burke had not opposed the French Revolution, he would likely be remembered as "progressive"."

"Mr. Burke talked in very high terms of Dr. Adam Smith; praised the clearness and depth of his understanding, his profound and extensive learning, and the vast accession that had accrued to British literature and philosophy from these exertions, and described his heart as being equally good with his head and his manners as peculiarly pleasing. Mr. Smith, he said, told him, after they had conversed on subjects of political economy, that he was the only man, who, without communication, thought on these topics exactly as he did."

"Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought; it is his accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could float even an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English Toryism is apt to enter;—the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits."

"It is the fashion to treat Burke's writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was bounded, and his observation therefore at fault; but on the whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth."

"I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone better in speaking."

"You can hardly imagine what Burke is for all of us who think about politics, and are not wrapped in the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau. Systems of scientific thought have been built up by famous scholars on the fragments that fell from his table. Great literary fortunes have been made by men who traded on the hundredth part of him. Brougham and Lowe lived by the vitality of his ideas. Mackintosh and Macaulay are only Burke trimmed and stripped of all that touched the skies. Montalembert, borrowing a hint from Dollinger, says that Burke and Shakespeare were the two greatest Englishmen."

"As for politics I leave you as my legacy the request that you will read Burke's speeches from 1790 to 1795. They are the law and the prophets."

"Mr. Macknight, who is himself chiefly known as a pamphleteer, has given most prominence to Burke's political writings, and has scarcely done justice to his most remarkable literary production, the Abridgment of English History. The most learned of all the writers on the same subject, Lappenberg, says, speaking of this book, that if Burke had devoted himself continuously to historical pursuits, England might have possessed a history worthy to rank with the masterpieces of the Attic and the Tuscan historians. If we may believe the story that Burke desisted from the undertaking because Hume had taken up the same subject, it must ever be regretted that the reverse did not occur, and that the philosopher did not give way to the politician. We should certainly have had a much better History of England; for there is very little doubt that as Burke was our greatest statesman, so he would have been the first of our historians. In that part of the work which he completed, he speaks of mediaeval institutions with an intelligence and appreciation which in his time were almost equally rare among Catholics, Protestants, and infidels... At the age of thirty, Burke proved himself superior to that system of prejudice and ignorance which was then universal, and which is not yet completely dissipated."

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."

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

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

"If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue."

"If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

"Beauty is the promise of happiness."

"Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones."

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

"Are chiefly cherished in Provinces far from Capitals. They are the standing Wisdom of a Country, though frequently Preposterous on a first view of them."

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

"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."