Edmund Burke

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."

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

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

"Our antagonist is our helper."

"A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice."

"Mere ideas without consciousness or will are nothing."

"Let us be satisfied that in our own day we do our duty."

"Art and science cannot exist but in pleasantly cultivated minds."

"Rage and phrensy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years."

"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."

"A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world."

"Learning is the only thing for you."

"To love the public, to study universal good, and to promote the interest of the whole is the first and last commandment of nature."

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."

"The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions."

"Fear is the foundation of most governments."

"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."

"In all moral questions there is a sombre middle ground."

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

"We cannot change what we are not willing to look at."

"It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passion."

"Taxes are a theatrical prop: a 'useful illusion.'"

"The lovers of learning do not love learning for its own sake."

"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded."

"An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent."

"Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver."

"Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue."

"Prescription is the most powerful of all things."

"I would rather sleep a troubled sleep, than not sleep at all because my conscience is bothering me."

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."