So a while back, Rob linked to this piece at Duck of Minerva, where Charli Carpenter called attention to this essay arguing that a quotation oft-attributed to Edmund Burke was not, in fact, written by Edmund Burke. As Rob noted, the aphorism — some permutation of “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” — doesn’t even sound like something Burke would say or believe. It was all quite interesting, and I was able to use Rob’s and Charli’s posts in my historical methods course as a first-day conversation piece.
Anyhow, I was reminded of all this last night as I was laughing at the ridiculous signage to be discovered at the Orlando “Tea Party,” where literally hundreds of people showed up to . . . um . . . go John Galt or something. Amid the verbal and visual detritus, there was this contrived moment of photo-citizen-journalism:
The resemblance to the bogus Burke quotation strikes me as odd and suspicious. And though I’m not a Jefferson scholar by any stretch, I’d never actually seen this idea attributed to him. But the words show up all over the place, buttressing everything from neo-Confederate to human rights advocacy; you can even buy a t-shirt (worn, one supposes with some unintended irony, by a black dude) that clarifies a great American slaveholder’s one-step solution to defeating tyranny with audible acts of good conscience.
Problem is — as with the spiritually-identical Burke quotation — there doesn’t seem to be an original source. There’s nothing like it that turns up in the Jefferson Digital Archive, and the list of books that include the quotation is not, shall we say, confidence-inspiring. This fellow includes the quotation in the epigraph of his book, sewn awkwardly to another line that actually was written by Jefferson. Chuck Norris, of all people, is the only person on the entire intertubes who appears to have provided a footnote for the quotation, but alas, the relevant pages are restricted in Google Books (and damned if I’m going to buy a copy of Black Belt Patriotism when my daughter’s collection of Thomas the Tank Engine collection still lacks the objectively awesome Mighty Mac.)
So to invoke a scholarly term of art, can I call bullshit here? Or do I need to buy Chuck Norris’ book and follow him down the rabbit hole?
…in comments Ralph Luker points to this follow-up to the Burke article (linked in the first sentence) which is also quite excellent…. And since it includes the Jefferson quote among those permutations attributed to Burke, it would have saved me a bit of time…
36 comments
March 22, 2009 at 4:24 pm
rja
Hm. When I google Chuck Norris, I get this.
March 22, 2009 at 4:29 pm
andrew
Chuck Norris doesn’t need footnotes. All of history is a series of footnotes to Chuck Norris.
March 22, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Minivet
I’d assume Norris was just quoting from some dinky quotation book, but then I searched inside via Amazon and found it actually cites individual letters. (It also quotes or refers to Jefferson 40 times or so.) I quickly ran out of my viewing quota, or maybe they don’t allow access to the footnotes at all, but if someone else searches for “Jefferson” and skips to the last page of results, they might find the citation.
March 22, 2009 at 4:39 pm
a different eric
All Chuck Norris needs to gain a foothold is his bare hands (or feet).
March 22, 2009 at 4:44 pm
beamish
I’m delighted to report that the line seems to come from a Soviet movie.
March 22, 2009 at 4:47 pm
grackle
Alas, Mr. Norris’s footnote is only to this.
March 22, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Jason B.
We had an ARC copy of Black Belt Patriotism at my part-time job, so I paged through it on a break one night.
That book is so full of stupid my grandmother lost IQ points as I read it, and she’s been dead a decade.
March 22, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Tom E
This is all part of Chuck Norris’s planned Texas presidential run.
March 22, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Kurt Montandon
Please don’t give Chuck Norris money.
It’ll just encourage him.
March 22, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Bloix
If you had checked the Duck of Minerva comments, you have seen that I was able to find the following Burke quotation online:
“There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision and steadiness in that belief.”
From “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” available at http://books.google.com/books? id…j69SY#PPA299,M1
So the quotation that “doesn’t sound like something Burke would say or believe” is a distillation of something that he did in fact say and believe, as anyone not so lazy that he can’t be bothered to use Google could have found out.
It doesn’t seem at all unlikely that, in some source that is not available online, Burke condensed his own idea into the quotation that is now famous. Or perhaps someone else did, and attributed it to Burke.
In any event, Burke did believe it, and he came very close to saying it.
March 22, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Vance
B, I disagree that the familiar quotation is a “distillation” of that thought. He’s saying that good people must watch out for evil to protect themselves, not that they must speak out against evil to avert tyranny.
March 22, 2009 at 8:34 pm
andrew
Leaving aside the question of what Burke believed or would believe or could plausibly be said to have believed, the thing about quotes is that they’re quotes, not paraphrases. The famous “play it again, Sam” never said in Casablanca will always not be a quote from Casablanca even though something very close really was said in the film.
March 22, 2009 at 8:47 pm
andrew
And I wouldn’t be all that surprised to find Jefferson saying things similar to this quotation. What I’d love to know, if it is real, how it escaped the works now online – which include some quotation compendia from the 19th century – only to emerge quite recently, unattributed to any source directly known to have been authored by Jefferson. And if it is not real, I’d love to know how it got attributed to Jefferson. Surely there are linguists who’ve studied this sort of thing.
March 22, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Ralph Luker
The best discussion that I can find of the quotation’s attribution to Burke is here. I think Noon is safe to call “Bullshit”.
March 22, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Colin
There’s a vast internet-fueled process of bogus quotation-assigning. There’s a small group of dead famous people with the right cultural currency. All manner of platitudinous bullshit gets attributed to Albert Einstein, for example.
March 23, 2009 at 5:37 am
Bloix
Vance, did you see the context? Burke wrote this in a letter to a member of the National Assembly of France. He wasn’t talking about individual security. He was talking about opposition to tyranny.
Luker, your link provides another similar verified quotation from Burke. He calls he usual form “a good quote made better by its passing into common wisdom.” That’s a far cry from “bullshit.” Looks to me like your source agrees with me that the standard quote, although perhaps erroneous, is something that Burke might have said, and that he did believe it.
March 23, 2009 at 6:12 am
rea
Not to mention the other issue raised by the photograph, which is, “Why are the stripes in that flag sideways?”
March 23, 2009 at 8:50 am
Bloix
Rea – presumably the flag is being displayed vertically. See, e.g, http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/hh/5/hh5h.htm
By the way, regardless of whether Burke said it, it’s not clear why people think that it’s antithetical to his beliefs. Burke was an active reformer, campaigning against the slave trade, against corporal punishment for homosexual acts, for Catholic emancipation, against British policies in North America. He was quick to attribute evil motives to those he disagreed with, and he had no patience for inaction or passivity.
Last comment: Wikiquote may have found the original, although this is a very obscure source for something so widespread:
“Burke’s alleged quote bears a striking resemblance to the narrated theme of Sergei Bondarchuk’s Soviet film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s book “War and Peace”, in which the narrator declares “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”, although since the original is in Russian various translations to English are possible.”
lhttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke#Misattributed
March 23, 2009 at 11:26 am
Ralph Luker
Bloix, If you were paying attention, Noon calls “bullshit” on attribution of the quotation to Jefferson. Your own secondary evidence seems to support that.
March 23, 2009 at 11:49 am
eric
The Burke “quotation” is a principal example in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, on p. ix in the edition I have (the fifteenth) of the phenomenon whereby “a familiar adage often has evolved from a recognizable though differently worded source” — that being the “When bad men combine” etc. line from Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents of 1770.
I know, a dead-tree source. So olde-fashioned.
March 23, 2009 at 11:58 am
kid bitzer
similar case:
http://plato-dialogues.org/faq/faq008.htm
March 23, 2009 at 12:04 pm
eric
There is in fact a genre of these essays — you might call it “They Never Said It” — I can think of two in my field off the top of my head, one on a remark allegedly said by Woodrow Wilson and one on Vanzetti’s parting-shot speech.
March 23, 2009 at 12:08 pm
ari
Wilson’s “history written with lightning” quote?
March 23, 2009 at 12:11 pm
kid bitzer
“There is in fact a genre of these essays.”
that quote is usually attributed to aristotle, you know.
March 23, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Sifu Tweety
Then there’s the somewhat more downmarket “that isn’t actually in the Bible” subgenre.
March 23, 2009 at 12:17 pm
ari
Lincoln once said, “If Washington had, like, 30 goddamn dicks, I have at least four score and seven.” This might not be an exact quote, but it’s close enough to count.
March 23, 2009 at 12:36 pm
eric
As the Good Book says, if you spit in the air, it lands in your face.
March 23, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Ralph Hitchens
Well, if Burke didn’t say it, somebody had to. It makes such obvious sense.
March 23, 2009 at 12:37 pm
eric
Wilson’s “history written with lightning” quote?
No, it’s some line about how he worries the World War will erode civil liberties. Which he didn’t actually worry about, apparently.
March 23, 2009 at 12:39 pm
dana
It’s the everything-is-in-the-Bible-or-Shakespeare genre.
March 23, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Sifu Tweety
As the Good Book says, ain’t no party like a grand ol’ party cuz a grand ol’ party don’t shut up.
March 23, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Bloix
Oh dear. I see that Beamish beat me to the wikiquote attribution to the War and Peace movie. My apologies, Beamish.
March 24, 2009 at 6:03 am
rea
Rea – presumably the flag is being displayed vertically.
It isn’t, though–look at the hole and the rope.
Maybe it’s the Coast Guard Ensign?
March 25, 2009 at 1:08 am
herbert browne
Sounds like vintage Ted Sorenson… ^..^
March 25, 2009 at 1:32 am
Nick
There was a laundromat in the town of Oberlin, OH, where a sign above the larger industrial washers read:
Please use very little soap.
Some clever little graffitti marxist added quotes and attribution:
“Please use very little soap.”
-Karl Marx
I assume the anonymous rephrasing of the possibly not-Burke quote was attributed to Jefferson the same way.
March 25, 2009 at 4:54 am
kid bitzer
you have nothing to lose but your stains!