Top 100 Burke Quotes
#1. The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe.
George Eliot
#2. I've learned to accept the fact that my students are far too busy preparing for their own legal careers to care one bit about the off-campus antics of Professor Burke. I get the impression that my students are vaguely aware of my novels, but are at best mildly curious.
Alafair Burke
#3. Ah?" he said, vaguely. "No, I dinna think so. Still," he said with a smile, pulling his attention suddenly back to her, "I wouldna be likely to. A young burke of sixteen's too taken up wi' his own grand self to pay much heed to what he thinks are naught but a rabble of snot-nosed bairns.
Diana Gabaldon
#4. Burke laughed, but there wasn't any humor in his voice. Romeo and Juliet died, son. Consider that all the answer you need.
Joanna Wylde
#5. 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
#6. The fact is Burke is smarter than two thirds of the Western Australian Labor Party rolled together
Paul Keating
#7. I listened to the veteran wrestlers that had tons of experience, like Leo Burke. I was never really alone.
Robert Maillet
#8. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. (Edmund Burke)
Zack Love
#9. A strong nation is one that is loved by its people and, as Edmund Burke put it, for a country to be loved it ought to be lovely.
Ronald Reagan
#10. All the general propositions favouring freedom I had .. imbibed at my father's knee or acquired by candle-end reading of Burke and Hayek ...
Margaret Thatcher
#11. In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.
David Sedaris
#12. 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
#13. When I met Jimmy Burke in 1964, he practically owned New York's Kennedy Airport. If you ask me, they named the place after the wrong Irishman.
Henry Hill
#14. We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
William Butler Yeats
#15. [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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. British Statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker, Edmund Burke once said, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." This is true to say the least.
Robert Paulson
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. THE CHARACTERISTIC passion of Burke's life was his love of order.
Edmund Burke
#25. 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
#26. The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke
Barbara W. Tuchman
#27. The die-hard opinions of George III couched in the language of Edmund Burke.
Stanley Baldwin
#28. Initially, 2,000 copies were printed. Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge: as late as the 1790s Edmund Burke estimated the reading public at below 100,000.
Henry Hitchings
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Alafair Burke is one of the finest young crime writers working today.
Lisa Unger
#32. 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
#33. It is not that good people go to paradise - wherever good people are, it becomes paradise. And wherever stupid people and idiots are - they may be great believers in God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Bible, it does not matter - even paradise becomes a ruin. It becomes a hell." - Edmund Burke
Osho
#34. 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
#35. What are you worried about, Burke?"
"You, me, fall, friends, college, life. Nothing big.
Jen Calonita
#36. Bow down, peons," Lincoln said. "I'm a king among men." "Where are you coming up with this?" Cole asked him. Lincoln pointed at Jackson. "Um, hello - Jackson Burke knows my name.
Lauren Layne
#37. Earth is a homicide victim. We lose our children. There are wars. Disease. And God comes strolling by like a cosmic Billie Burke.
William Peter Blatty
#38. It was needlepoint, Mr. Burke. Tapestries are woven, you see, and I find it far more satisfying to stab than to weave.
Meredith Duran
#39. Also, there's the caliber of actors that we keep getting. Lorraine Bracco plays my mom and Chazz Palminteri plays my father, and Brian Dennehy and Donnie Wahlberg have been on the show. And, we've got Billy Burke from Twilight. We've gotten all kinds of fantastic actors. That speaks for itself.
Angie Harmon
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle," Burke writes.
Yuval Levin
#43. Monty blinked. "On what charge, sir?" "On the charge of being a pain in my ass," Burke growled. "And right now, that is good enough for an overnight stay in our facility.
Anne Bishop
#44. A writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator ...
John Geddes
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. We're a part of something here, Mr. Burke. Something that matters. All of us." "Here's the thing, Marcus, and I don't want you to ever forget it. Nobody fucking asked me or anyone in that valley if we wanted to be a part of this.
Blake Crouch
#48. 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.
#49. Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality".
Tony Judt
#50. I don't know why anyone wants to get married," said Burke. "I think the whole thing was cooked up by lawyers so they can get rich off of divorce.
Michael Thomas Ford
#51. 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
#52. To protect the innocent, to avoid being one of Burke's good men who do nothing, you have to accept permanent scars that cincture the heart and traumas of the mind that occasionally reopen to weep again.
Dean Koontz
#53. Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society is the end for which Providence has prepared man.
Russell Kirk
#54. 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
#55. CORPORAL BURKE GRINNED, no humor in his expression but plenty of satisfaction as he jammed the throttle of the M7 Abrams main battle tank, flattening the tiny import in front of him to a mashed pulp as he rumbled over it.
Evan Currie
#56. The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.
Russell Kirk
#57. 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
#58. I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.
Melissa Rosenberg
#59. The thing you contend for to be reason," Burke had said, "show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#60. He also was pleased by the fact that Burke's touch evoked feelings within him that him that he had never experienced before.
Lyssa Samuels
#61. My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.
Celia Imrie
#62. 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
#63. ... why do men continue to practice in themselves, the absurdities they despise in others?
Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke's attack on the French Revolution (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1791), p. 41.
Thomas Paine
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.
Clifford Geertz
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I'm proud to say that I was that guy playing the character of Dr. Burke on 'Grey's Anatomy.'
Isaiah Washington
#72. He had to do better. He had to be more equitable.
Because Jane Burke was counting upon him. And she was still holding his hand. And he liked it.
Elizabeth Essex
#73. Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
Roger Scruton
#74. There have been 14 versions that I can find of Burke & Hare movies. They have all been horror films and all the movies have taken place in Victorian times, which doesn't make any sense.
John Landis
#75. Jackson hesitated, licking a drop of whisky from his bottom lip with his tongue.
Mollie's stomach tightened a little, but she told herself that it hadn't. It mostly worked - she'd gotten darn good at telling her body that it had absolutely no response to Jackson Burke.
Lauren Layne
#76. Emma Burke is different from anything else.
She's what I'm supposed to have. She's what my first kiss should have been. And she's the only kiss I ever want to remember.
Ginger Scott
#77. The gods speak to us, and irony is their language.
Tim W. Burke
#78. All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.
Edmund Burke
#79. Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed? Dave Robicheaux
James Lee Burke
#80. Delusion and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.
Edmund Burke
#81. Every third night a commitee holds a meeting in my head.
James Lee Burke
#82. Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn.
Edmund Burke
#84. I go to Saint Barth in the French West Indies for two weeks each year. That place is amazing. Amazing people, beautiful beaches, great wine, wonderful harbors ... It's incredibly romantic.
Brooke Burke
#87. Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Edmund Burke
#88. Most criminals are stupid. They creep $500,000 homes in the Garden District, load up two dozen bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and Collins mix in a $2,000 Irish linen tablecloth and later drink the booze and throw the tablecloth away.
James Lee Burke
#89. In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
Edmund Burke
#90. It is undoubtedly the business of ministers very much to consult the inclinations of the people, but they ought to take great care that they do not receive that inclination from the few persons who may happen to approach them.
Edmund Burke
#91. There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.
Edmund Burke
#92. Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.
Kenneth Burke
#93. Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
Edmund Burke
#94. It's tourists in New York. Everything is geared towards that. It's so hard on Broadway now for them to get people in there. They have to compete with so many other entertainments, so they have to bring a star in which puts people there out of work.
Delta Burke
#95. When you read a book, you hold another's mind in your hands.
James Burke
#96. I'm also crazy about Pilates Plus, which I do three times a week. The class is 55 minutes, head to toe. In that short amount of time, I've done everything I need to do. And for a working mom, what could be better?
Brooke Burke
#97. The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.
James Lee Burke
#98. There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.
Edmund Burke
#99. How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?
James Lee Burke
#100. The marketplace obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success.
Edmund Burke
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