Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.
Edmund BurkeAs the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcastโalternately tempestuous and sereneโso is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.
Edmund BurkeIn doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But theworks of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.
Edmund BurkeRestraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.
Edmund BurkeThe whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies [synonyms] and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. Things never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes called agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess sometimes too continued an exercise of revolutionary power.
Edmund Burke