If the grain were separated from the chaff which fills the Works of our National Poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in the proportion of a mole-hill to a mountain. – Edmund Burke
The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations. – Edmund Burke
Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls. – Edmund Burke
Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world. – Edmund Burke
It sometimes happens at the end of a dinner, when jokes and walnuts are cracked together, that the paternity of some trite quotation is put in question, and at once the wit of the whole company is set wool-gathering. – Frederic Swartwout Cozzens, “Phrases and Filberts,” Sayings, Wise and Otherwise
The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own…. It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism. – James Gleick, 1993