Edmund Burke Quotes

Abhorrence of apartheid is a moral attitude, not a policy.

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

But what you could perhaps do with in these days is a word of most sincere sympathy. Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that victory in one form or another cannot elude you for long.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own choice, is often the means of their regeneration.

Persecuted truth has triumphed everywhere over protected and powerful error.

You [a country] cannot be rich, successful and powerful and still be loved, particularly be those who have little success, wealth or power.

Pray, what thing in the world can be done worse towards us, than if men should rob or steal us away, and sell us for slaves to strange countries; separating husbands from their wives and children. Being now this is not done in the manner we would be done at; therefore, we contradict, and are against this traffic of men-body. And we who profess that it is not lawful to steal, must, likewise, avoid to purchase such things as are stolen, but rather help to stop this robbing and stealing, if possible. And such men ought to be delivered out of the hands of the robbers, and set free …

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.

In the name of the young girl sold from the warm clasp of a mother's arms to the clutches of a libertine or profligate,—in the name of the slave mother, her heart rocked to and fro by the agony of her mournful separations,—I thank you, that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race

Call not Maryland a land of liberty; do not pretend that she has chosen this country as an asylum, that here she has erected her temple and consecrated her shrine, when here, also, her unhallowed enemy holds his hellish pandemonium and our rulers offer sacrifice at his polluted altar. The lily and the bramble may grow in social proximity, but liberty and slavery delight in separation.

Ask of politicians the end for which laws were originally designed, and they will answer that the laws were designed as a protection for the poor and weak against the oppression of the rich and powerful. But surely no pretense can be so ridiculous

Let us not despair; it is a blessed cause, and success, ere long, will crown our exertions. Already we have gained one victory; we have obtained, for these poor creatures, the recognition of their human nature, which, for a while was most shamefully denied. This is the first fruits of our efforts; let us persevere and our triumph will be complete

Military success against autocratic governments and their selfish and cruel policies of conquest became the one object of the whole people, no matter at what cost.

The rashness of the persecutor hath overspread the rights of the persecuted so that punishment is awarded to him that has gained the victory, the inglorious triumphs, and the man who deserved bonds has carried off the prize.

I wish my national team all the best.

If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.

They don't want you to win.

For life affords no higher pleasure, than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. He that labours in any great or laudable undertaking, has his fatigues first supported by hope, and afterwards rewarded by joy... To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.

In victory, the hero seeks the glory, not the prey.

If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

I prefer a dirty victory to a noble defeat.