Good and Evil


All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

This very nice and famous quote is attributed to Edmund Burke (1729-1797) an Irish political philosopher and statesman. However, wikipedia says something interesting about it:

This is probably the most quoted statement attributed to Burke, and an extraordinary number of variants of it exist, but all without any definite original source. These very extensively used remarks may be based on a paraphrase of some of Burke's ideas, but he is not known to have ever declared them in so succinct a manner in any of his writings. They may have been adapted from these lines of Burke's in his Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents (1770): "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Anyway, I definitely agree with the content of the sentence, whatever its origin is.

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