Edmund Burke Famous Quotes

Davy’s work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.

Take Michael Oakeshott’s famous definition in his essay “On Being Conservative”: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott’s either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is not between something and its opposite but between something and its negation.

Only a well-coordinated and well-conditioned pride of lions can bring down a male African buffalo, and not a few die trying. There is much reward for success, but much risk in the attempt. Such was also the case for Paleolithic humans who hunted aurochs. This combination of danger or dread and magnetic appeal evokes the sense of the sublime so famously described by Edmund Burke.1

When we fail to take action, we forfeit the future. And just as inaction is an action, indecision is a decision. As Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

as Edmund Burke famously put it, ‘a state in the guise of a merchant’.

George Washington had said that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” John Adams had insisted that public virtue, “the only foundation of republics,” could not “exist in a nation without private” virtue. Alexander Hamilton had written that “virtue and honor” were the “foundation of confidence” that underpinned “the institution of delegated power.” The contemporary Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke had famously declared that “society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.” Trump had said to hell with all that. And he had gotten elected anyway. It’s true that many presidents seem petty when measured against the founders. But Trump was different even from prior unsavory men who had attained the presidency. They had at least feigned that they cared about these values and expectations. Trump had campaigned against them and won on that basis.

As Edmund Burke, the famous conservative in the 18th century Britain, said: "The essence of diplomacy is to yield gracefully what you cannot withhold." And I would add: "And try to make sure the other side pays as much as you can get them to pay", as you make concessions to them. (Excerpt from interview "Amb. Chas Freeman: The US Endgame in Syria and Ukraine")