Edmund Burke Quotes

I'm 68 years old, and I'm as much a criminal now as I was at the age of 22. And, I'm even more of a dissident than I was then.

During this glorious reign Ireland has seen 1,225,000 of her children die of famine, starved to death whilst the produce of her soil and their labor was eaten up by a vulture aristocracy, enforcing their rents by the bayonets of a hired assassin army in the pay of the –best of the English Queens’

The Americans have escaped from England.

First, the urban guerrilla must use ... violence ... to win a popular base. Then the government has no alternative except to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life ... unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government is unjust, incapable of solving problems and resorts ... to the physical liquidation of its opponents ...

The struggle, begun this morning upon the hustings of your old town, is not a struggle between two men—it is a struggle between two countries. On the one side, the side of the Whig candidate, hangs the red banner beneath which your senate has been sacked, your commerce has been wrecked, your nobility has been dishonored, your peasants have been starved. On the other side … floats the green flag beneath which your senate sat, your commerce thrived, your nobility honored, your peasants prospered.

As the important contest, into which we have been driven, is now become interesting to every European state, and particularly affects the members of the British Empire, we think it our duty to address you on the subject. We are desirous, as is natural to injured innocence, of possessing the good opinion of the virtuous and humane. We are peculiarly desirous of furnishing you with a true state of our motives and objects; the better to enable you to judge of our conduct with accuracy, and determine the merits of the controversy with impartiality and precision.

Fellow citizens: The hour to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived. Stand together in face of the brutal, cowardly enemies of your race! Bring English tyranny to its knees. Pay no rent under any pretext! The government, with its bayonets, will learn in a single Winter how powerless are armed forces against the will of a united determined, and self-reliant nation.

The one enemy in the world that America has is England. But then, England is the great land of Christian civilization, and it may not be a thing to be much wondered at that our Americans whom we send to represent us in London become in a short time somewhat civilized, and learn to love those who hate them, bless those that curse them, and do good to those that persecute and calumniate them.

If god is the root cause for our degradation destroy that god. If it is religion destroy it. If it is Manu Darma, Gita, or any other Mythology (Purana), burn them to ashes. If it is temple, tank, or festival, boycott them. Finally if it is our politics, come forward to declare it openly

A more mischievous idea cannot exist, than that any degree of wickedness, violence, and oppression may prevail in a country, that the most abominable, murderous, and exterminating rebellions may rage in it, or the most atrocious and bloody tyranny may domineer, and that no neighboring power can take cognizance of either, or afford succor to the miserable sufferers.

In all the great wars of England, the war of the American Revolution, the war against the French Revolution, the Crimean War,, there were men who stood out against those ventures, and against a nation lashed to madness by the appeals and lies of its leaders. They were but a miserable minority, but history has triumphantly vindicated them.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.

The government has decided that the same force would be employed in America as if the inhabitants were French or Spanish enemies

A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune. and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated. but the difficulties of established prejudice: the man dies, but his memory lives

This [passing the Prohibitory Act] puts us in a complete war with America.

America must be a colony of England or treated as an enemy.

The whole British argument in the [Irish potato] famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect. It’s a dangerous, mean-spirited. Tired argument.

In the infancy of the rising the rebels made open proclamation that no Scot, upon pain of death, should be stirred in body, goods or land, and that they should to this purpose write over the lintels of their doors that they were Scots, and so destruction might pass over their families

You have no enemy but England…. Although we fought once and lost, it is only a lesson for the second time…. Every vote you give now is as good as the crack of a rifle in proclaiming your desire for freedom.

Lord North, after the affair at Saratoga, from the beginning of the year 1778, made every effort to procure from the king permission to resign. These efforts were continually repeated for a long period, but in vain : the king could not give up the idea of coercing America, and therefore could not part with the only man who was, he thought, fit to manage the House of Commons.

It is impossible we should think of submission to a government that has with the most wanton barbarity and cruelty our defenseless towns … excited the savages to massacre our peaceful farmers, and our slaves to murder their masters, and is even now bringing foreign mercenaries to deluge our settlements in blood.

...I will praise the English climate till I die—even if I die of the English climate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds; in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair.

It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.

Forbear to lay the guilt of a few on the many.

You know, anytime you take one group and you blame them for a problem, there is an issue.