Edmund Burke

Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.

Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny.

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke - A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origins Of The Sublime And Beatiful.
A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others and may make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth.

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises; for never intending to go beyond promises; it costs nothing.

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.

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

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

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives.
Edmund Burke - A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Sublime and Beautiful
A man who works beyond the surface of things,though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others and may make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth.

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke - Speech on the Conciliation of America
All government -- indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act -- is founded on compromise and barter.
Edmund Burke - "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", 1756
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke - Speech to the electors of Bristol. 3 Nov. 1774
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

- Edmund Burke