Edmund Burke

"History is full of the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up."

"You can never plan the future by the past."

"When we risk no contradiction, we risk error."

"Art and elegance of manners are not the priority of an inferior rank."

"The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people's hands, that is, to give them the power at large."

"All government is founded on compromise and barter."

"In a democracy, the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority."

"We are afraid to put men to live and work out their own salvation."

"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."

"A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

"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 execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is a servile one."

"The cold neutrality of an impartial judge."

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away."

"A disposition to preserve the old is as necessary for peace as a disposition to improve things new."

"Habit is a powerful teacher."

"The circumstances are what render every political principle beneficial or noxious to mankind."

"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting."

"Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society."

"Dangers by being despised grow great."

"The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity."

"Never, no, never did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another."

"The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity."

"Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman."

"Ambition can creep as well as soar."

"If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed."

"The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine."

"Society requires not only that it should be sustained, but that its direful evils should be redressed."

"What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue."