This one is real. The sentence appears in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, in the passage where he argues that constitutions must be reformed slowly, by many minds working together, rather than remade at speed. A 1790 printing scanned by the Internet Archive carries it in the period spelling: “Our patience will atchieve more than our force.”
“Our patience will achieve more than our force” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790): "Our patience will achieve more than our force." Genuine — the sentence is in the text; the 1790 printing spells it "atchieve."
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Provenance
The source
Work
Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event
First published
November 1790 · London, printed for James Dodsley of Pall Mall
Form
A pamphlet written as a letter “intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris”
As printed in 1790
“Our patience will atchieve more than our force.”
Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force.
Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
Text as given in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 3, and matched word for word by the Wikisource transcription. The scanned 1790 printing sets the verb in the period spelling, atchieve.
Cross-checked Wikiquote’s Edmund Burke page ↗, which lists the line under Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) rather than among its misattributed or unsourced entries. Quote Investigator has no article on this quotation.
✓Public domain
Reflections on the Revolution in France was first published in London in November 1790 and written in English, so no translation stands between the reader and Burke’s words. A work published in 1790 is long out of copyright in the United States, and the text may be quoted and reproduced freely.
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Fact-check
The quote is real — the citations around it are not
Burke is one of the internet’s most reliable magnets for invented quotations, so a Burke line that turns out to be genuine is worth saying plainly: this one is in the book. What goes wrong with it is smaller — the wording gets trimmed and the source gets dropped.
✕
Wording“Patience will achieve more than force.” Trimmed
Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in London in November 1790 by James Dodsley, cast as a letter to a gentleman in Paris — it grew out of Burke’s replies to the young French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had written asking what he made of events across the Channel. Burke’s answer was not what a sympathiser wanted to hear: he argued for gradual, constitutional reform rather than revolution, and warned that doctrines built on abstractions could be turned to justify tyranny.
The line sits inside that argument, not beside it. Burke has just imagined an objection — that reforming slowly “is not fit for an Assembly which glories in performing in a few months the work of ages” — and answers that political arrangements are social work, requiring many minds and therefore time. Patience is not passivity here; it is the method.
Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at.
How the pamphlet landed
It sold. Wikipedia’s account of the work records that thirteen thousand copies were purchased in the first five weeks, and that by the following September it had gone through eleven editions — which is why so many separate 1790 and 1791 printings of the book survive in library scans today.
That multiplicity of printings is also why the modern quotation looks slightly different from the page. Eighteenth-century compositors set the word as atchieve; later collected editions of Burke’s Works modernised it to achieve, and that is the form every quote site now reproduces.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1729–1797 · Anglo-Irish statesman, orator and political philosopher
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer and politician who sat in the British House of Commons as a Whig and is widely credited as the founder of modern conservative political philosophy. He made his name defending the American colonists and prosecuting the East India Company’s Warren Hastings, then broke with many of his own allies over the French Revolution. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is the book that argument produced — and the book this sentence comes from.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this source
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1790. Text as reprinted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 3 (Project Gutenberg ebook no. 15679).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Our patience will achieve more than our force’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/our-patience-will-achieve-more-than-our-force/