Edmund Burke

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Good order is the foundation of all good things.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

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

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observation of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.