The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
People will not look forward to prosperity if they can see hope only in their own class.
Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity.
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
A people who are still, in a great degree, strangers to the movements of the loftier faculties of the soul, are naturally incapable of discussing parallel, or even collateral, questions.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.
Some decent, regulated pre-eminence, some preference which reason approves, is, in all mixed governments, the true secret for reconciling the powers of traditional hierarchy with the demands of enlightened reason.
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature and the means perhaps of its conservation.
Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
You can never plan the future by the past.
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
Good order is the foundation of all good things.
There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
A woman, who is not sensible of the warm workings of benevolence, is defective in the proper constitution of her mind.
But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue?
Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.
Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.
Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it.
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment, we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Good order is the foundation of all good things.
All possible confidence is due only to the people; and this is seized for the purpose of betraying them.
Slavery is a weed that grows on every dunghill.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
Education is the cheap defence of nations.
Man is a dependent being; he is dependent upon the society in which he lives, and upon the labour of many millions of men past and present.
I cannot conceive any reason why we should be at the expense to furnish people with their own money.
Justice must be the substance of government. Power without responsibility is tyranny.
Reflections on the Revolution in France is a beautiful and rugged work, rather a collection of incomparable fragments than a regular treatise.
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
The pretence of a separate power in the House of Commons is either a mere delusion on the people, or, if it be true may give push to others’ abhorrence of our so cursed constitution.
To innovate is not to reform.
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.
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