Wealth & Money Quote by Edmund Burke

Burke lands a hard truth with the coolness of a man who has watched governments try to buy affection and end up purchasing contempt. “To tax and to please” is a deliberately jarring pairing: taxation is the most intimate intrusion of the state into daily life, and “please” is the softest, most consumerish verb imaginable. Put them together and you get the fantasy every administration sells at budget time: we can take from you and you will thank us for it.

The line’s hidden engine is its analogy. Burke folds fiscal policy into the same category as “to love and to be wise,” two ideals people routinely demand of themselves and others, then routinely fail to achieve. He’s not excusing clumsy taxation; he’s warning against the kind of political rhetoric that promises pain without resentment. The subtext is anti-utopian: human beings don’t reliably reconcile competing goods, and politics becomes dangerous when it pretends otherwise.

Context matters because Burke is a statesman writing in an age of revolutions, expanding empires, and rising public expectations. Taxation wasn’t a technical matter; it was a trigger for legitimacy, especially in Britain’s conflicts over revenue and representation. Burke’s conservatism here is pragmatic rather than sentimental: if you treat citizens like customers you can “delight” while charging a fee, you misunderstand both citizenship and human psychology.

The sentence also protects policymakers from their own vanity. It’s a memo against the seductive idea that moral purity, perfect wisdom, and painless revenue can be manufactured by clever design. In Burke’s world, governing is choosing trade-offs, then surviving the backlash with honesty intact.