Hugh Hollowell

Perhaps one of the most used quotes out there is “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing“, by Edmund Burke. Or is it?

In an effort to track down the source of this oft attributed line, Martin Porter, back in the winter of 2002, tracked down hundreds of variants and linked to hundreds of sites, but could never reach the source. His conclusion?  Burke never said it.  It is a “pseudo-quote”.

It is generally believed to be an adaptation from Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents (1770): “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.“

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.

You are Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, so long as you in no way let yourself become established in the situation of the world, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are Christian only when you believe you have a role to play in the realization of the new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life. – Henri Nouwen (via Brian McLaren)

“Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down —Oscar Romero”

– Jesus Radicals