Edmund Burke

1729–1797 · Anglo-Irish statesman, orator & political philosopher

Born in Dublin in 1729, Burke sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1794 for Wendover, Bristol and Malton, and served twice as Paymaster of the Forces. He wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the book that made him the founding voice of modern conservatism. That reputation is precisely the problem: a name synonymous with moral seriousness attracts moral-sounding maxims he never wrote, and an unsigned proverb from his own century attaches to him more readily than to almost anyone else. Nothing here was forged in his style — the adage was in a proverb book when Burke was three. It simply drifted, as good ownerless lines do, towards the most quotable moralist in reach.

Traced to source

6 quotes we’ve traced to Edmund Burke

“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”

Verified

“Our patience will achieve more than our force”

Verified

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse”

Verified

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle”

Verified

“If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue”

Disputed

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”

Disputed

Not actually Edmund Burke

Often misattributed to Edmund Burke

Famous lines widely pinned on Edmund Burke that we’ve traced to someone else.

“Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones”

actually Charles Caleb Colton

“Beauty is the promise of happiness”

actually Stendhal

“If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”

actually Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland

“If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue”

actually Unknown — an anonymous English proverb

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little”

actually Sydney Smith

“Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all”

actually Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling — it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel”

actually Frederic Harrison

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”

actually No verified author

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it”

actually George Santayana

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