Edmund Burke Quotes

Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.

To know the good is to react against the bad. Indifference is the mark of deprivation.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

I've been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy.

I firmly believe there are no bad people.

Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.

To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Life is moral responsibility.

It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack.

In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.

Fear guides more to their duty than gratitude; for one man who is virtuous from the love of virtue, from the obligation he thinks he lies under to the Giver of all, there are ten thousand who are good only from their apprehension of punishment.

Do what's right and you'll please some of the people and astound the rest.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.

There is a very good thing about hating evil. If you hate evil, that's all you will hate

The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points--his duty God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.

I'm a human being with a conscience, and when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.

Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.

The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.

You don't go by your feelings. You do what is right.

We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.

All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.

Try to be all you can be to be the best human being you can be. Try to be that in your church, in your temple. Try to be that in your classroom. Do it because it is right to do.