Quote of the Day: Edmund Burke on Success

If you have ever watched something wrong unfold and told yourself it wasn’t your place, then this warning from Edmund Burke is meant for you: “All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” It’s not a slogan about villains; it’s an indictment of the quiet shrug, the polite silence, the decision to keep your head down.

The unsettling insight here is mathematical. Evil rarely needs unanimous support. It needs gaps, moments when decent people outsource responsibility to “someone else,” or decide that the cost of speaking up is too high. In those gaps, wrongdoing becomes normal, then durable. Institutions degrade the same way bodies do: not only from direct attack, but from neglect.

Burke’s line also challenges a comforting self-image. Many of us believe that being “good” is a private possession, an opinion we hold, a virtue we feel. But moral integrity is public-facing. It shows up as courage when it’s inconvenient, as leadership when nobody appointed you, as small interventions that interrupt momentum: correcting a lie, backing a targeted colleague, voting, reporting, refusing to laugh along.

Edmund Burke earned his authority on this question by studying how societies unravel, through revolutions, populist fervor, and elite complacency. A British Whig with conservative instincts, he distrusted utopian promises precisely because he had seen what happens when restraint and responsibility collapse.

November 5th carries its own reminder in the English-speaking world, Guy Fawkes Night, born from a plot stopped before it could explode. Not every crisis arrives with a fuse. Most arrive as a choice: to act early, in small ways, before silence becomes complicity.