Burke Significant Quotes

Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.

People didn't like having to come up with something smart or helpful or sensitive to say, and they weren't intelligent enough to realize that all we wanted, all I wanted, was to be treated the same as I had been three months before. I wanted to be ignored because of my eccentricities, not because of my brother. And I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling. So, if you feel sorry for someone, don't pretend to be happy. Don't pretend to care only about their problems. People aren't stupid. Not all of us, anyway. If someone's little brother disappears, don't give him a free hamburger to make him feel better-- it doesn't work. It's a good burger, sure, but it means nothing. It means something only to the Mr. Burkes of the world. Offering free meals, free stays in condos in Florida, even free plumbing. And we let them. We let them because they need it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we were useful in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute. So, old ladies, make your casseroles and set them on doorsteps. And old men, grill your burgers and give them to teenagers with cynical worldviews. The world can't be satisfied, but that need to fix it all can.

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . . Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . . The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . . Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason"--that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . . Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . . At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. When schooled Americans of that era approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed their American experience and justified convictions they held already. So far as Locke served their needs, they employed Locke. But other men of ideas served them more immediately. At the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu. Montesquieu rejects Hobbes's compact formed out of fear; but also, if less explicitly, he rejects Locke's version of the social contract. . . . It is Montesquieu's conviction that . . . laws grow slowly out of people's experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. "When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural," Montesquieu says. It was from Montesquieu, rather than from Locke, that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers. . . . What Madison and other Americans found convincing in Hume was his freedom from mystification, vulgar error, and fanatic conviction: Hume's powerful practical intellect, which settled for politics as the art of the possible. . . . [I]n the Federalist, there occurs no mention of the name of John Locke. In Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention there is to be found but one reference to Locke, and that incidental. Do not these omissions seem significant to zealots for a "Lockean interpretation" of the Constitution? . . . John Locke did not make the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or foreordain the Constitution of the United States. . . . And the Constitution of the United States would have been framed by the same sort of men with the same sort of result, and defended by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had Locke in 1689 lost the manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing the narrow seas with the Princess Mary.

You must control bugs,” I say. “Bugs no eat fruit,” it answers. In other words, how can you control an animal except with fruit? “Change sap for bugs. Like this.” I show a chemical. “Sap will control animals.” “Bugs no eat fruit.” “Bugs drink sap.” “Yes,” it says. “Bugs no eat fruit.” “Change sap for bugs because bugs drink sap, no eat fruit.” “Bugs no eat fruit.” I realize that we are related plants, both bamboos, in fact, and our shared physiology is the only reason I can have a conversation of any complexity. The hedge along the river is too small to have many sentient roots. The presence of other snow vines triggers an aggressive growth, but this hedge has lived alone and is content to lead a manicured little life parasitizing its aspens and putting down more guard roots than it needs, thus serving the humans without realizing it. It has no need for intelligence, none at all. “Change sap for bugs,” I repeat, hoping that repetition will of itself prove persuasive. “Big animals eat bugs.” “Bugs no eat fruit.” “Big animals eat bugs.” “Big animals eat bugs,” the snow vine repeats. I have made progress. “Yes,” I say. “Change sap for bugs.” “Big animals eat bugs.” “Yes. Change sap for bugs. Like this.” “Bugs eat sap,” it says. “Bugs are pests.” “Bugs are good. Big animals eat bugs like fruit.” The snow vine stammers some meaningless chemical compounds and finally says, “Bugs are like fruit.” This is very significant progress. “Bugs are like fruit,” I agree. “Bugs eat sap. Change sap. Sap will control two animals.” “Sap will control bugs. Big animals eat bugs.” “Yes. You must change sap for bugs and animals.” “I will change sap for bugs and animals.” At last! “Yes. Change sap like this.” I deliver some prototype chemicals.

The Nazis were meticulous in creating a legal framework for their persecution of the Jews. This was gradually built up from 1933 with increasing burdens laid on the Jews. Thus, the faithful citizen or member of the Volk had no good cause to question what was being done because there was valid legislation to justify every step. No one has rejected such an approach more succinctly than Edmund Burke who, in 1775, spoke for three hours in the House of Commons on ‘Conciliation with America’. The significant concept is, ‘It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to do.’ Under the Nazis these were often two very different paths.

Do you ever stop to consider how seldom your significant other uses your name in daily life? For us it was always some term of endearment, like “honey” or “babe”, or even the more extravagant “sugar badger” or “manly mouse”. The only time that changed was during arguments when the strangeness of being called by your name left no doubt that you were in trouble.

The impact of obstetric drugs on the human race cannot be overemphasised. Globally, 500,000 deaths result from illegal drug use, and over 70 percent of these deaths are opioid-related. In 2018, some 58 million people around the world were known to use illegal opioids; the unknown number would be significantly higher. Between 2010 and 2018, the number of fatal opioid overdoses in America increased by 120 percent. Fentanyl and other drugs used in an obstetric context were involved in two-thirds of these deaths; in 2018, there were over 31,335 deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics alone.

In sharing his vision of the ‘black light’ – significantly, Brady wanted the phrase to be the title of his autobiography – he was again calling attention to the genesis of his sociopathy.

The likelihood of my baby being injured during co-sleeping was, in reality, significantly lower than it would have been had I left her in the hospital cot. In the UK, 90 percent more babies die alone in baskets or cots – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – than they do when they securely, rather than hazardously, co-sleep with their mothers.

At age nineteen I did not want to accept the possibility that a man’s murder could be treated with the social significance of a hangnail that had been snipped off someone’s finger.

I had killed people before, in war and as a member of the New Orleans police department, and I know what it does to you. Like the hunter, you feel an adrenaline surge of pleasure at having usurped the province of God. The person who says otherwise is lying. But the emotional attitude you form later varies greatly among individuals. Some will keep their remorse alive and feed it as they would a living gargoyle, to assure themselves of their own humanity; others will justify it in the name of a hundred causes, and they’ll reach back in moments of their own inadequacy and failure and touch again those flaming shapes that somehow made their impoverished lives historically significant.

During the writing of this book, I found myself questioning why the sixteenth-century history of the Irish-English conflict—“the Mother of All the Irish Rebellions”—has been utterly ignored or forgotten. This episode was by far the largest of Elizabeth’s wars and the last significant effort of her reign. It was also the most costly in English lives lost, both common and noble. By some estimates, the rebellion resulted in half the population of Ireland dying through battle, famine, and disease, and the countryside—through the burning of forestland—was changed forever. Yet almost no one studies it, writes of it, or discusses it, even as the impact of that revolt continues to make headlines across the world more than four hundred years later. Likewise, few people outside Ireland have ever heard of Grace O’Malley, surely one of the most outrageous and extraordinary personalities of her century—at least as fascinating a character as her contemporary and sparring partner Elizabeth I. Of course history is written by the victors, and England was, by all accounts, the winner of the Irish Rebellion of the sixteenth century. But the mystery only deepens when we learn that the only contemporary knowledge we have of Grace’s exploits—other than through Irish tradition and legend—is recorded not in Ireland’s histories, but by numerous references and documentation in England’s Calendar of State Papers, as well as numerous official dispatches sent by English captains and governors such as Lords Sidney, Maltby, and Bingham. As hard as it is to believe, Grace O’Malley’s name never once appears in the most important Irish history of the day, The Annals of the Four Masters. Even in the two best modern books on the Irish Rebellion—Cyril Fall’s Elizabeth’s Irish Wars and Richard Berleth’s The Twilight Lords—there is virtually no mention made of her. Tibbot Burke receives only slightly better treatment. Why is this? Anne Chambers, author of my two “bibles” on the lives of Grace O’Malley (Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O’Malley) and Tibbot Burke (Chieftain to Knight)—the only existing biographies of mother and son—suggests that as for the early historians, they might have had so little regard for women in general that Grace’s exclusion would be expected. As for the modern historians, it is troubling that in their otherwise highly detailed books, the authors should ignore such a major player in the history of the period. It

Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Scholars Press. Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. University of California Press. ________. Jesus as Mother. University of California Press. Camporesi, Piero. The Anatomy of the Senses. Cambridge Polity Press. ________. Bread of Dreams. Cambridge Polity Press. ________. The Incorruptible Flesh. Cambridge University Press. Cardono, Girolamo. “The Book of My Life.” New York Review of Books, 2002. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons. Clarendon Press. Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions 1500–1700. Princeton Paperbacks.

Your representative,” Burke remarked, “owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion. Of significant issues—including emancipation—Lincoln remarked to Herndon, “All such questions must first find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God’s own time they will be organized into

...the fight or flight response is a destructive constant companion. As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris put it, the response is great "If you're in a forest and there is a bear... When that happens, the Harvard researchers found, the sector of the brain that deals with highly stressful situations takes over. "Significant stress in early childhood, ' they write, "... result[s] in a hyperresponsive or chronically activated physiological stress response, along with increased potential for fear and anxiety" For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict always activted- the switch flipped indefinitely. We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom. We become hard-wired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there's no more conflict to be had.

I have a significant and inescapable communication to enter into with them. Animals never grow smarter, but I do. Ours will be a rewarding relationship.

Given the close association of Locke’s name with a particular brand of contemporary radical thought, it is understandable that Burke hardly mentioned Locke. As Peter Stanlis rightly points out: Burke’s opponents who attacked him from the assumption of revolutionary “natural rights” were generally well aware that they were in the political tradition of Locke. In 1793 the Constitutional Society of Sheffield printed an abstract of Locke’s Treatise on Civil Government, the preface of which stated: “Edmund Burke, the Knight Errant of Feudality, declared in the House of Commons, that ‘Locke’s Treatise on Civil Government, was the worst book ever written.’ We are certain it needs no further recommendation.”22 Whilst there is no direct record of Burke making this statement, it is significant that contemporary Lockeans clearly saw Burke as an opponent of Locke.

Love is the beginning of significance.

No matter how unfamiliar my world becomes, I can always find my way home when I dance.