Skip to content

Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.

— Edmund Burke Attributed

Another quote →

Source and credibility

Wikiquote lists this as attributed to Edmund Burke, but no primary source has been found.

Source: .—John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels, and Thomas C. Jones, The International Encyclopedia of Quotations, p. 791 (1978). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

More by Edmund Burke

People must be governed in a manner agreeable to their temper and disposition; and men of free character and spirit must be ruled with, at least, some condescension to this spirit and this character.

Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769)

The rights of the people are every thing, as they ought to be in the true and natural order of things.

On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1794)

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

I am well aware, that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told of their duty.

An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

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

Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769)

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

Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

All Edmund Burke quotes →

Topics

Youth

More quotes by Edmund Burke

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Speech at a County Meeting of Buckinghamshire (1784)

You can never plan the future by the past.

A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

All Edmund Burke quotes →

You may also like

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

J. M. Barrie Peter Pan (1904)

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

Euripides

The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; “they will both fall into the ditch.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edmund Burke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.