Edmund Burke Quotes on Nature
Edmund Burke appealed frequently to nature in his political philosophy, and the quotes gathered here show the characteristic uses he made of the idea. Politics, he argued, ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, to people as they actually are, shaped by custom, which reconciles us to everything. Burke also invoked a higher law of nature and of nations, a moral order governing rulers and ruled alike, which he cited in his impeachment of Warren Hastings. And he recognised change itself as natural and inescapable, calling it the most powerful law of nature and perhaps the very means of nature's conservation. For Burke, respecting nature meant grounding politics in experience, habit, and the slow work of reform rather than abstract theory.
Quotes
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“Custom reconciles us to everything.”
Part IV Section XVIII -
“War ," says Machiavel , "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.”
Wikiquote -
“A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.”
Introduction On Taste -
“It is reconciled in policy; and politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part; and by no means the greatest part.”
1760s | Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 78 -
“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 -
“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 -
“We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.”
1790s | Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) -
“You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.”
Reflections on the Revolution in France(1790) | Volume iii, p. 277 -
“There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.”
Undated | Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 261