Edmund Burke - the father of modern conservatism

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) served as a Whig Member of Parliament for many years. He was regarded as a "liberal" because of his support for the American Revolution but he then became known as a "conservative" because of his condemnation of the coercive egalitarianism of the French Revolution. Burke is now regarded as the father of "modern conservatism."

Here are some quotes from Burke's writings:

But the age of chivalry is gone. - That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Manners are of more importance than laws... Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in.

The quote "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" is often attributed to Burke, but does not appear in his works or recorded speeches.

Karl Marx of course detested Burke. In Das Kapital, he wrote:

The sycophant—who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.

But Winston Churchill regarded Burke as one of the greatest British political thinkers:

On the one hand [Burke] is revealed as a foremost apostle of Liberty, on the other as the redoubtable champion of Authority. But a charge of political inconsistency applied to this life appears a mean and petty thing. History easily discerns the reasons and forces which actuated him, and the immense changes in the problems he was facing which evoked from the same profound mind and sincere spirit these entirely contrary manifestations. His soul revolted against tyranny, whether it appeared in the aspect of a domineering Monarch and a corrupt Court and Parliamentary system, or whether, mouthing the watch-words of a non-existent liberty, it towered up against him in the dictation of a brutal mob and wicked sect. No one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the same ideals of society and Government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other.