Edmund Burke Quotes

Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

I hate uneducated people having power …

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them.... In every country these two parties exist.... Call them, therefore, liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same party still and pursue the same object.

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.

The volunteer military has always been most enthusiastically, even devoutly, embraced by those who would not themselves dream of volunteering - or of encouraging their children to do so.

We pride ourselves on our democracy, but when you see the way it actually works, I think it is worthy of contempt.

Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.

If there's one epithet the Right never tires of, it's 'elitism.'

Westminster's hardly a billboard for people-centred politics. Given its makeup, the term 'Commons' is pretty ironic, too.

When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lakeshore Drive, it's hospitality.

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

The diverse natures of men, combined with the necessity to satisfy in some manner the sentiment which desires them to be equal, has had the result that in the democracies they have endeavored to provide the appearance of power in the people and the reality of power in an elite.

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

On solemn asses fall plush sinecures, So keep a straight face and sit tight on yours.

What a liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.

When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!