Edmund Burke

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Kings are naturally lovers of low company.

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

The effects of liberty on the human mind are not always favourable to the peace of society, or to the order of a state.

Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

No man ever was a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.

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

The love of lucre, and not the love of liberty, is the motive of their conduct.

Difficulty is a severe instructor, always at our elbow.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.

The means of procuring happiness are always in our power.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

They who are in love with practice without theory are like the sailor who boards ship without rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

A great empire and little minds go ill together.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Of all the loose and sanguinary speculators, the French are the worst.