1729–1797 · Anglo-Irish statesman & political philosopher
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman, orator and philosopher, best known for Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and as a founder of modern conservative thought. This aphorism is the quotation most often hung on his name, yet scholars have never located it anywhere in his writings or speeches. The closest real Burke line, from his 1770 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, reads: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”