Edmund Burke Quotes on Time
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) gave eighteenth-century political thought its most influential conservative analysis of the relationship between the present political community and the long inheritance of the past. The central thesis is that legitimate political institutions are not the abstract constructions of a single revolutionary moment but the slowly developed sediments of generations of practical experience — the partnership Burke famously names is “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” — and the Revolutionary attempt to refound the state on the rational principles of a single age is therefore a category mistake about the temporal nature of political life. The framework, integrating Burke’s earlier work on the sublime and the broader Anglo-Irish Whig tradition, founded the modern philosophical conservatism that descends through Coleridge, Newman, Oakeshott, and Scruton.
Quotes
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Attributed to Edmund Burke:
“Society is indeed a contract, between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
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“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
Volume iii, p. 274 -
Attributed to Edmund Burke:
“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”
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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”
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