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Edmund Burke Quotes

Browse 5 quotes about Edmund Burke.

Edmund Burke Quotes

“The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus Paine was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'—the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.”

PoliticsUnited StatesInfluenceRevolutionIndiaHumanismIsraelContradictionIndividualismIrelandConservatismCollectivismFrench RevolutionPartisanshipRadicalismFree ThoughtThomas PaineSpinozismEdmund BurkeGore VidalAmerica First CommitteeCharles LindberghIsrael Shahak
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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“[They] may have for instance taken the view of Edmund Burke, who in the 18th century made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.”

SocietyCivilizationEuropeConservatismKinshipEdmund Burke
Book:The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
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“Samuel Gregg: Smith underscores, however, that the Scots also focused on another form of rationality: the reasonableness that is embodied and conveyed through time by un-designed habits, customs, and rules. We often do not fully understand the importance of such traditions, as Edmund Burke noted, until we dispose of them. A hallmark of Smith’s work is his study of how such knowledge helps to mold political and economic outcomes. One Means by which such knowledge has been conveyed through time, Smith states, is religion. In a long footnote to his Nobel lecture, Smith stressed religion’s role in shaping the morality needed for cohesive social behavior.”

ReligionTraditionRationalityCohesionAdam SmithEdmund BurkeVernon Smith
Book:The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics
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“Burke's complaint against the [(French)] revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals - all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors - were expropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of the traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and all that result is not, perhaps, inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions. Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian thinking.”

Social ResponsibilityFrench RevolutionSocial CapitalRevolutionsEdmund Burke
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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