Edmund Burke Evil Quotations

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.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

The only thing needed for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing.

It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.

All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.

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.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

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.

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.

Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils.

Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Evil succeeds when good men do nothing

Evil prevails when good men fail to act.

The Fate of good men who refuse to become involved in politics is to be ruled by evil men.

Nothing is so rash as fear; its counsels very rarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate the evils from which it would fly.