"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
"Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it's yellow."
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Source: 'Letter to a Member of the National Assembly' (1791) p. 12
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More quotes by Edmund Burke
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
"The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis."
"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray, to not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour."
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."