Edmund Burke Quotes About Evil
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All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing as they must if they believe they can do nothing. There is nothing worse because the council of despair is declaration of irresponsibility; it is Pilate washing his hands.
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Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.
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Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils.
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A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.
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When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
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One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
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Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
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The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise isgone! it isgone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
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To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil.
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Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.
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Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
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There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.
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But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
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The Fate of good men who refuse to become involved in politics is to be ruled by evil men.
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Evil succeeds when good men do nothing
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Nothing is so rash as fear; and the counsels of pusillanimity very rarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate, the evils from which they would fly.
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Evil prevails when good men fail to act.
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All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.
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