Edmund Burke Quotes

Absolute power should never be trusted to man. It has perverted the wisest heads, and corrupted the best hearts in the world. I should be afraid to commit my property, liberty and life to a body of angels for one whole year.

Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best..

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced on his throne.

I don't see democracy getting better. I see democracy diminishing. More rules, more legislation. Eventually governments will see everything.

I have no desire to go in for tyranny or to play the part of King Charles. I hate tyranny in any field of human activity.

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

Where liberty dies, evil grows.

Too much liberty corrupts us all.

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

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

When more Americans prefer freebies to freedom, these great United States will become a fertile ground for tyranny.

Our political life is closed, and our freedoms usurped, and our people are oppressed, and fearful… if you don’t say what the ruler wants, you’re exiled beyond the sun.

The record of Arab regimes is disgraceful and outrageous … worse than that of the occupier or the colonialist.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and whenever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

In a free country there is much clamor with little suffering; in a despotic state there is little complaint, but much suffering.

Most governments are designed for the purposes of oppression and personal ambition.

Republicanism stands for vested rights, for imperialism, for graft, for the annihilation of every semblance of liberty. Its ideal is the oily, creepy respectability of a McKinley, and the brutal arrogance of a [Theodore] Roosevelt.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny.

The very name of a politician, a statesman, is sure to cause terror and hatred; it has always connected with it the ideas of treachery, cruelty, fraud, and tyranny…

That's how dictators get started.

We can see our liberties vanishing here in the United States... A little bit here and a little piece there... We can see it, we can feel it, and we can hear it.

Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.