Question 1

What is the best book to start with?

Accepted Answer

Reflections on the Revolution in France, the passages on partnership and on prejudice, in a full edition The famous sentences are long in the original. A short extract without the Revolution he is answering becomes a mood.

Question 2

What is the most famous quote?

Accepted Answer

This library does not measure fame, and it does not rank lines by how often they are shared. The first line it files for Edmund Burke that is not marked Questionable or Misattributed is “Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” (Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Paraphrase or translation).

Question 3

What is the most misquoted line?

Accepted Answer

The library marks this as Misattributed: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This sentence is not in the Reflections or Burke's other works. Related thoughts about the success of evil when good people fail to oppose it appear in various 19th-century writers, including John Stuart Mill in another form. The quotation people attribute to Burke is a later set piece. His real line about society as a partnership across generations is in this library.

Question 4

What is one key idea, in a sentence?

Accepted Answer

Partnership across time: Society binds the living, the dead, and the unborn, so a generation does not own institutions as private property.