Edmund Quotes

When you fear something, learn as much about it as you can. Knowledge conquers fear. ~ Edmund Burke

Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn. ~ Edmund Burke

A poet must sing for his own people. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman

Nobody likes him now but the people, ~ Edmund Morris

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination. ~ Edmund Wilson

So many novelists of our time eschew any "message," as if it's an aesthetic flaw. Maybe critics want to preserve our self-defeatingly clamorous culture by making sure no radical idea actually gets through and can be heard. ~ Edmund White

The earliest intelligence of the travellers' safe arrival at Antigua, after a favourable voyage, was received; though not before Mrs. Norris had been indulging in very dreadful fears, and trying to make Edmund participate them whenever she could get him alone; and as she depended on being the first person made acquainted with any fatal catastrophe, she had already arranged the manner of breaking it to all the others, when Sir Thomas's assurances of their both being alive and well made it necessary to lay by her agitation and affectionate preparatory speeches for a while. ~ Jane Austen

I had thought of annihilating the entire block that I lived on. ~ Edmund Kemper

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. ~ Edmund Burke

The proper direction of man's thought is not toward the creation of new laws for government, but toward the acceptance of every person's moral dignity. ~ Edmund Yates

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness. ~ Edmund Husserl

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. ~ Edmund Burke

It's not a real adventure when you have to pay for it. ~ Edmund Hillary

Thankfulness is the tune of angels. ~ Edmund Spenser

Everybody feels better about himself, his community, and his country if employers are paying workers well. Economics, though, teaches that if every employer is pressured to raise wages, some labor will be priced out of the market. ~ Edmund Phelps

[Speaker Reed's] wit was brilliant and usually cruel ... Asked to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he refused, but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it. ~ Edmund Morris

No man is competent to manage another. ~ Edmund A. Opitz

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity. ~ Edmund Morris

Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage. ~ Edmund Burke

You know the head's where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That's the person. I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. the body is nothing after the head is cut off ... well that's not quite true. With a girl there's a lot left in the girl's body without a head. ~ Edmund Kemper

Most of the members are positively corrupt, and the others are really singularly incompetent. ~ Edmund Morris

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later. ~ Edmund White

From the second Edmund burst into the ceremony, she'd no longer wanted to be a duchess.
She just wanted Edmund.
Seeing his face had been like being flooded with magic. He was sunshine and sultry nights.
Laughter and sensuous kisses. The other half of her heart. ~ Erica Ridley

It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions. ~ Edmund Morris

You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that? Come up with a smiling face, It's nothing against you to fall down flat But to lie there - that's a disgrace. ~ Edmund Vance Cooke

Could we forbear dispute, and practise love, We should agree as angels do above. ~ Edmund Waller

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp air - which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it, a larger sky ...
("Sir Edmund Orme") ~ Henry James

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it. ~ Edmund White

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. ~ Edmund Burke

Liberty had many friends in the eighteenth century. ~ Edmund Morgan

This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff. ~ Edmund De Waal

Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding. And to prevent the least hope of amendment, a king is ever surrounded by a crowd of infamous flatterers, who find their account in keeping him from the least light of reason, till all ideas of rectitude and justice are utterly erased from his mind. ~ Edmund Burke

my white plume"
- Cyrano de Bergerac ~ Edmund Rostand

Liberty, without wisdom, is license. ~ Edmund Burke

This iron world bungs down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate. ~ Edmund Spenser

Well into the 20th century, scholars viewed economic advances as resulting from commercial innovations enabled by the discoveries of scientists - discoveries that come from outside the economy and out of the blue. ~ Edmund Phelps

Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. ~ Edmund Burke

Good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?
What! hath some wolfe thy tender lambes ytorne?
Or is thy bagpype broke, that soundes so sweete?
Or art thou of thy loved lasse forlorne? ~ Edmund Spenser

In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function. ~ Edmund Burke

The Edmund Pettus Bridge - which in 2013 was declared a National Historic Landmark - isn't symbolic of the Civil War in a meaningful way. It is, however, the modern-day battlefield where the voting rights movement was born. ~ Douglas Brinkley

An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror. ~ Edmund Burke

Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged. ~ Edmund Wilson

None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning--either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in it's inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of Summer. ~ C.S. Lewis

It is generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles and design. ~ Edmund Burke

Nor did Kevin go, "Ew-w," when he pulled his penis out and it was brown and smelly, and that, too, Guy considered a rite de passage. ~ Edmund White

He does not only declare that God saves by grace, not works; he brings Christ forward, and placards him. Preaching points to Christ crucified for our sins, and risen for our life. ~ Edmund P. Clowney

The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more. ~ Edmund Burke

The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living. ~ Edmund White

Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because, of all enemies, it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource. ~ Edmund Burke

Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. ~ Edmund Burke

Recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway of a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or too homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes. ~ Edmund White

Norway ... looked to Roosevelt as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe ... It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king. ~ Edmund Morris

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer. ~ Edmund Burke

Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence? ~ Edmund Morgan

Yet nothing did he dread, but euer was ydrad. ~ Edmund Spenser

For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew. ~ Edmund Burke

In general the languages of most unpolished people have a great force and energy of expression; and this is but natural. Uncultivated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distinguishing them; but, for that reason, they admire more, and are more affected with what they see, and therefore express themselves in a warmer and more passionate manner. ~ Edmund Burke

O fresh-lit dawn! immortal life!
O Earth's betrothal, sweet and true! ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman

Edmund had obviously never yet experienced the speed with which news traveled round the docklands. "Is there anyone who does not know him?" "All ~ Susanna Kearsley

Happy is she that from the world retires, and carries with her what the world admires. ~ Edmund Waller

A government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions; nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of quality, who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power. ~ Edmund Burke

Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it's yellow. ~ Edmund Burke

I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said 'no.' I sort of paid attention to that. ~ Edmund White

Hard it is to teach the old horse to amble anew. ~ Edmund Spenser

Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in almost every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself, more or less, with all our pleasures. ~ Edmund Burke

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice. ~ Edmund Burke

Although Guy was thirty-five he was still working as a model, and certain of his more ironic and cultured friends called him, as the dying Proust had been called by Colette, 'our young man. ~ Edmund White

The holiness of the church means that life, as well as truth, marks Christ's church; the behavior of Christians in the world must be remarkable enough to cause grudging admiration, astonished curiosity or threatening hostility. ~ Edmund Clowney

Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can't leave. ~ Edmund White

And thus of all my harvest-hope I have Nought reaped but a weedye crop of care. ~ Edmund Spenser

Those of us born into vitalist and expressionist cultures must hope that governments will draw back from shutting down the modernist project of exploring, experimenting, and imagining - of voyaging into the unknown - that has been essential for rewarding lives. ~ Edmund Phelps

sight. In his essay On The Sublime, Edmund Burke observes, "Represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have...and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are filled with expectation, let it be reported that a criminal is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square..." And in a moment, the theater will be empty. In these bloody rituals of execution and repression, the leader becomes the ancient God-King stepping forward to save his people, a promise as dangerous as it is seductive. If there is one lesson we can take away from the extravagant lives of our tyrants it is the fragility of our democratic society which, after all, is the exception, not the norm, in that dark, violent story known as human history. ~ Daniel Myerson

Edmund Clowney observes that prayer involves an honesty that has no real parallel in human relationships, because every human relation necessarily involves only a part of your personality. We relate differently to our spouse, our business partner, and a chance acquaintance on the street because each of our social roles expresses only a part of our personhood. Even our spouse sees only part of who we are. "In relation to God, however, we are 'naked and pinned down' (Heb 4:13). Our masks are gone, pretense is useless: the relationship is not partial, but total. All that we are stands related to our Maker and Redeemer."245 ~ Timothy J. Keller

When I was a small boy, my father told me never to recommend a church or a woman to anyone. And I have found it wise never to recommend a restaurant either. Something always goes wrong with the cheese souffle. ~ Edmund G. Love

The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis. ~ Edmund Burke

I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published. ~ Edmund White

There is something about building up a comradeship - that I still believe is the greatest of all feats - and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers. It's the intense effort, the giving of everything you've got. It's really a very pleasant sensation. ~ Edmund Hillary

To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil. ~ Edmund Burke

America was the attic of French culture. ~ Edmund White

Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind. ~ Edmund Burke

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny. ~ Edmund Burke

For evil deeds may better than bad words be borne. ~ Edmund Spenser

He is blinded and nothing will open his eyes,nothing can,after having had truths so long before him in vain.--He will marry her and poor and miserable.God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable!"---She looked over the letter again."So very fond of me!tis"nonsense all.She loves nobody but herself and her brother.Her friends leading her astray for years!She is quite as likely to have led them astray. They have all,perhaps, been corrupting one another;but if they are so much fonder of her than she is of them,she is the less likely to have been hurt except by their flattery.The only woman in the world,whom he could ever think of as a wife.....I firmly believe it.It is an attachment to govern his whole life. Accepted or refused,his heart is wedded to her for ever.The loss of Mary,I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and Fanny.Edmund you do not know me.The families would never be connected,if you did not connected them.
Oh!write,write.Finish it at once.Let there be an end of this suspense.Fix, commit,condemn yourself."-Fanny Price ~ Jane Austen

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth. ~ Edmund Burke

The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry. ~ Edmund White

For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; ~ Edmund Spenser

The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion. ~ Edmund Burke

As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct. ~ Edmund Burke

When Lillian left work in the early evening the streets were slick and shiny with rain and the lamps flared yellow giving her the melancholy feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She'd just struggled to push up her umbrella when the farmer from Saskatchewan came out of the shadows and tipped his hat again, very politely, and said could he escort her home? She put her small hand on his broad arm and held the umbrella over both their heads (he was very tall) and he walked her all the way back to her lodging-house where the landlady, Mrs Raicevic, looked after Edmund after school. By then, Lillian had learned the farmer's name and she said, 'Edmund, this is Mr Donner,' and Pete Donner squatted right down and said, 'Hello there, Edmund, you can call me Pete.' Although he never did, preferring to call him 'Pop' almost from the day his mother married him. ~ Kate Atkinson

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world. ~ Edmund Husserl

Environmental problems are really social problems anyway. They begin with people as the cause and end with people as the victims ~ Edmund Hillary

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded. ~ Edmund Burke

It is the mind that maketh good of ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor. ~ Edmund Spenser

A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is torn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion. ~ Edmund Burke

Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman but he cannot make a gentleman. ~ Edmund Burke

No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government. Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution, and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system. You have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance, 27 who carry your bolts in their pounces to the remotest verge of the sea. But there a power steps in that limits the arrogance of raging passions and furious elements, and says, SO FAR SHALL THOU GO, AND NO FARTHER. Who are you, that you should fret and rage, and bite the chains of nature? Nothing worse happens to you than does to all nations who have extensive empire; and it happens in all the forms into which empire can be thrown. In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. ~ Edmund Burke

There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times. ~ Edmund Burke

Then they came out of the narrow valley and at once she saw the reason. There stood Peter and Edmund and all the rest of Aslan's army fighting desperately against the crowd of horrible creatures whom she had seen last night; only now, in the daylight, they looked even stranger and more evil and more deformed. ~ R.J. Palacio

The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections. ~ Edmund Burke

The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people,' who created the government that Americans still live under. ~ Edmund Morgan