Burke Quotes

“What the devil was this story? Douglas pushed open the door to his sitting room, propped one shoulder against the window frame as he opened the plain, prudish cover, and began to read.
By the end of the first page his eyebrows started to rise. By the end of the second, his mouth was hanging open. And when he reached the last page, he no longer cared about Spence's wager or the bounty on Lady Constance's head or what Burke was thinking to let Joan read this.
If Madeline Wilde had written this
even if every word sprang solely out of her imagination and not from her experience
he wanted to get to know her much, much better.”

— Caroline Linden

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph, said Burke, is for good men to do nothing; and most good men nowadays can be relied upon to do precisely that. Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

“When Bill Burke asked my mother out, she experienced the unluckiest day of her life. Diana (to become my high school sweetheart-and wife) agreeing to go out with me was the luckiest day of my life.”

— M.J. Burke Sr.

“Edmund Burke once described society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. It is difficult to see in the evolving system who will speak for the yet unborn, for the future.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“I recalled a sermon Burke had delivered months ago, when everything from the Jew hole was still safely abstract, wisdom I could enjoy in the unactionable pit of my mind. They will sniff at your legs, went Burke's sermon. They will wish they were you. Beware the man on his knees, the display of weakness. But the sermon had not passed through the radio coherently that day; static cloaked the transmission. Every other word was weakness, as if the broadcast were looping by mistake. We were to fear weakness not in oneself, where it should be cherished, but in others. Or not fear it, but mistrust it. We too easily believe in the trouble of others, erect a machinery of caring. Look through the story at the teller's need, was the caution. Share not your full story, went the warning.”

— Ben Marcus

“The word nature has given rise to a multitude of errors. Let me repeat that the nature of any being is the sum of the qualities attributed to it by the Creator. With immeasurable profundity, Burke said that art is man's nature. This is beyond doubt; man with all his affections, all his knowledge, all his arts is the true natural man, and the weaver's cloth is as natural as the spider's web. Man's natural state is therefore to be what he is today and what he has always been, that is to say, sociable. All human records attest to this truth..”

— Joseph De Maistre

“She can go places we cannot, associate with people we cannot, understand things about society types and women that we never can. (Why Mr. Burke hires Violet Strange.)”

— Candida Martinelli

“Yes," said Cooley. "That is the question, as the Bard might say." "The Bard?" "What's so funny?" said Cooley. "Nothing, sir," I said. "I just didn't know people still used that term." "Well, I'm a people, Burke. Am I not?" "Of course." "If you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?" Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. "Yes, sir," I said.”

— Sam Lipsyte

“The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.”

— Niall Ferguson

“For Burke, almost everything that makes life worthwhile is a result of society, its inherited codes, knowledge, and institutions. These goods are fragile, and when they are destroyed, the result is human misery ... Among the greatest of man's needs, according to Burke, was the need for society and government to provide "a sufficient restraint upon their passions." As far back as his Vindication of Natural Society, Burke had argued that the destruction of inherited institutions and cultural practices would result not in natural harmony, but in barbarism. For Burke, as for Adam Smith, man is preeminently social man who realizes himself morally only under the tutelage of society. (p. 131)”

— Jerry Z. Muller

“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all, Burke writes.”

— Yuval Levin

“People always ask if Burke and Caelum are brothers because they're both so tall, and neither Michael seems bothered by the question, but it drives me out of my mind because besides the height they look nothing alike. Burke's got blond hair and freckles. Caelum has a mass of dark pubic hair growing out of his head. Plus, how the hell could they be brothers when they have the same first name? That only works if your last one is Foreman.”

— Tiffanie DeBartolo

“In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of "negative pain": the idea that a feeling of fear-paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away-can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life.”

— Leslie Jamison

“Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth
that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud.”

— Thomas Szasz

“Davy's work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.”

— Mark Kurlansky

“Burke, and the better men among his disciples, knew that change in society is natural, inevitable, and beneficial; the statesman should not struggle vainly to dam the whole stream of alteration, because then he would be opposing Providence; instead, his duty is to reconcile innovation and prescriptive truth, to lead the waters of novelty into the canals of custom. This accomplished, even though he may seem to himself to have failed, the conservative has executed his destined work in the great mysterious incorporation of the human race; and if he has not preserved intact the old ways he loved, still he has modified greatly the ugly aspect of the new ways.”

— Russell Kirk

“And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man. If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.”

— Russell Kirk

“There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey ; Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor Johnson ; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times ; Lamb; Landor ; and De Quincey ;- a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator ...”

— John Geddes

“I'm proud to say that I was that guy playing the character of Dr. Burke on 'Grey's Anatomy.'”

— Isaiah Washington

“The question of maintaining a serious moral order while allowing economic freedom has, I think, troubled people right from the beginning of history, and has always been a tension within conservative thinkers, going right back to [Edmund] Burke. The traditional way of reconciling these two things was through religion, which would remove certain things from the market. Sex is removed from the market and made into a religious ceremony, and parent-child relations, education, etc. I think that's the great benefit that religion has deferred on people down the centuries. Take it away now and we don't know quite what's going to happen.”

— Roger Scruton

“Doing 'White Collar,' quite often my character goes undercover, so therein lies the compounding of the imagination. I get to play Peter Burke and then someone else when Peter Burke goes undercover.”

— Tim DeKay

“Cardinal Raymond Burke is a 66-year-old guy who lives in Rome, dresses like Queen Elizabeth, and talks like someone who majored in misogyny at some bogus, backwoods, Bible-banging tent school.”

— Mike Barnicle

“The show is being changed right now, by the way. Jeff Burke is doing it for the Magic Kingdom. And I think it will be better, with new birds, master of ceremonies, etc.”

— John Hench

“There can be no freedom without order, and there is no order without virtue. Now, that's a simple enough formulation, but it's an insight found not only in the writings of Founding Fathers like Washington or great political thinkers like Edmund Burke; it is also found in a great part of our Judeo-Christian tradition.”

— Ronald Reagan

“The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

“Atlantic's Jerry Wexler believes first-rate records are made by first-rate voices. He certainly has worked with enough of them: Clyde McPhatter, Joe Turner, La Vern Baker, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin.”

— Jon Landau

“Kathy Burke has been a real inspiration. I think she's brilliant. I like the fact she doesn't care what she looks like on TV and just gets really into character. Obviously, she can do drama as well, but it's her comedy I love.”

— Sheridan Smith

“Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.”

— Randall Jarrell

“Edmund Burke provided the answer in 1795: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

— Dean Koontz

“Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.”

— Joseph J. Ellis

“Vernon Bogdanor's account The Monarchy and the Constitution is written as much in the shadow of Edmund Burke as it is of Walter Bagehot. He stresses the organic development of the British constitution, prefers evolution to revolution, and thinks stability is better than strife.”

— David Cannadine

“The worst part is, you know they're not going to be together forever. I mean, come on, she's fifteen. Okay, sixteen. Still. It's not like they're going to get married or anything. Even if they last a couple of years which they won't she'll go to one college and he'll go to another, and pretty soon they'll forget all about each other. That's what always happens. That's why teenage dating is so dumb, because it's doomed to fail. You'd think people would have learned that by now, but I guess they haven't. They go right on falling in love and thinking it's going to survive high school. Allie and Burke, true love always. Whatever.
Anyway, happy birthday, Allie. I hope it was a good one.”

— Michael Thomas Ford

“If I were a girl, I'd be sucking every cock I could get my mouth on," Will said. "Fuck, I'd take on the whole football team at one time."
Burke ran his hand through Will's hair. "Careful," he said. "You don't want to get a reputation as a bad girl. No one will marry you, then.”

— Michael Thomas Ford

“I love that word. Gaydar. So clever."
"I'm afraid mine is broken," Burke said. "It never occurred to me that you were gay."
"It's because I'm teeming with masculinity," Gaither joked.”

— Michael Thomas Ford

“Ll that is necessary for evil to triumph
is for good men to do nothing. I supposed old Edmund Burke had meant to include women in that. And if he hadn't, well, screw him.”

— Rachel Caine

“It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”

— Thomas Paine

“Yet, with all that, no one dared to interfere. Burke had exhausted all his eloquence in trying to induce the British Government to fight the revolutionary government of France, but Mr. Pitt, with characteristic prudence, did not feel that this country was fit yet to embark on another arduous and costly war. It was for Austria to take the initiative; Austria, whose fairest daughter was even now a dethroned queen, imprisoned and insulted by a howling mob; surely 'twas not-so argued Mr. Fox-for the whole of England to take up arms, because one set of Frenchmen chose to murder another.”

— Emmuska Orczy

“It's great to be happy, but not all the time. Let yourself feel. When you're sad let yourself cry, when you're mad let yourself scream. Experience your emotions, feel them. Just do not remain there with them. - Sheila Burke”

— Bryant McGill

“Grosvenor and Burke suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about the world. It can help to manufacture rote obedience or independent activity; it can create high self-confidence or low self-esteem.”

— Alison Lurie

“Humility, which Burke ranked high among the virtues, is the only effectual restraint upon this congenital vanity; yet our world has nearly forgotten the nature of humility. Submission to the dictates of humility formerly was made palatable to man by the doctrine of grace; that elaborate doctrine has been overwhelmed by modern presumption.”

— Russell Kirk

“I read the Phantom comics when I was in Australia shooting 'Dead Calm' and when one of the crew told me that there were plans for a movie, I went for it. That was in 1987 and I told (producer) Graham Burke I was going to be the Phantom. We had a laugh about that recently because you usually get what you deserve, not what you desire, and that is especially true in Hollywood!”

— Billy Zane

“The die-hard opinions of George III couched in the language of Edmund Burke.”

— Stanley Baldwin

“The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.”

— Paul Fry

“Alafair Burke understands the criminal mind. Long Gone is both an education and an entertainment of the first order. This is a very clever and very smart novel by a very clever and smart writer. The dialogue crackles, the plot is intriguing, and the pacing is perfect.”

— Karin Slaughter

“[Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.”

— Roger Scruton

“We need to support Mary Burke for Governor!”

— Michelle Obama

“I took a fortnight off. But I'm not a great believer in breaks. I don't want to be rattling around inside my own head. I did feel I was spiralling into a Kathy Burke character and tried going out, but I prefer it here. Filming keeps me busy. It absorbs me.”

— Nigella Lawson

“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.”

— Woodrow Wilson