Edmund Burke Quotes on Justice
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), and the long campaign of impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings for the conduct of British rule in Bengal gave eighteenth-century British political philosophy its most influential conservative analysis of justice. The central commitment is that justice is not the abstract pattern of rights deduced from the metaphysics of human nature but the concrete reasonableness slowly worked out through the practical experience of generations — and the corresponding political and constitutional traditions through which actual peoples have learned to live together justly are owed a deference that the rationalist Revolutionary critic systematically denies. The framework shaped subsequent Anglo-American conservative thought on the rule of law, prescription, and the moral significance of established institutions.
Quotes
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“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
When bad men combine , the good must associate ; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle . It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country ; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act , but always voted according to his conscience , and even harangued against every design which he a -
Attributed to Edmund Burke:
“Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed.”
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“Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in the college of the pontiffs for above a century.”
An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 196 -
“Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the”
An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 196 -
“In the interval between his campaigns Agricola was employed in the great labours of peace. He knew that the general must be perfected by the legislator; and that the conquest is neither permanent nor honourable, which is only an introduction to tyranny... In short, he subdued the Britons by civilizing them; and made them exchange a savage liberty for a polite and easy subjection. His conduct is th”
An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 215 -
“These principles it is necessary strictly to attend to, because they will serve much to explain the whole course both of government and real property, wherever the German nations obtained a settlement; the whole of their government depending for the most part upon two principles in our nature,—ambition, that makes one man desirous, at any hazard or expense, of taking the lead amongst others; and a”
An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 282 -
“He was one of those who wished for the abolition of the Slave Trade . He thought it ought to be abolished on principles of humanity and justice.”
1780s | Speech in the House of Commons (9 May 1788), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVII (1816), column 502 -
“There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations.”
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings(1794) | 28 May 1794 -
“Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.”
1780s | Letter to M. de Menonville (October 1789) -
“You have theories enough concerning the Rights of Men. It may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their Nature and disposition.”
1780s | Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), p. 46 -
“Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.”
Reflections on the Revolution in France(1790)