My Dear Chap, I'd be happy to let you know the origin of your tagline. But you won't like it I suspect. This from a very long essay on the quote in question....
"Anyway, the complete answer to the origins of the triumph-of-evil quote is not to be found on the Web, but in a very neat dictionary of misquotations I have discovered by Paul F Boller and John George called
They never said it (Oxford University Press, 1989).
- The much-quoted triumph-of-evil statement appeared in the 14th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1968), with a letter Burke wrote William Smith on January 9, 1795, given as the source. But the letter to Smith was dated January 29, 1795, and it said nothing about the triumph of evil. When New York Times columnist William Safire asked Emily Morrison Beck, editor of the 15th edition of Bartlett’s, about the source, she acknowledged she hadn’t located the statement in Burke’s writings ‘so far’, but suggested it might be a paraphrase of something Burke said in a speech he gave in Parliament, ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’, on April 23, 1770: ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’ Safire thought her suggestion was a ‘pretty long stretch,’ but she included it in her introduction to the new edition of Bartlett’s.
Boller and George give a number of references, among which are Safire’s
New York Times articles ‘Triumph of Evil’, of 9 March 1980, and ‘Standing Corrected’, of 5 April 1981. So
Bartlett’s is the culprit, and the invention as recent as the 60s of the last century. It would seem in fact that the yoking together of the triumph-of-evil quote with the bad-men-combine quote goes back to Ms Beck. The two quotes often occur side-by-side on internet quote lists, which is probably why people assume one must be a paraphrase of the other.
Boller and George’s little book is a fascinating read. Their preface traces the history of quotes in the USA as instruments of political rhetoric. First their use, then their misuse, and finally their invention. The purely mendacious activity of conscious quote-faking they associate with the political right,
- Radicals have plenty of quotations from Karl Marx, anyway, and probably see no need to add to the Marxist treasure-house. Extreme rightists in America have a real problem, in any case; they would like to cite the Founding Fathers, but rarely find what they want in Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson. Hence the quote-faking.
And certainly tracing the triumph-of-evil quote over the Web does keep taking you far more often than you would like to extreme rightist pages from the USA - John Birchers, libertarians, gun nuts, pro-life extremists of the abortion debate, and so on. The heart of darkness of the world wide web."
http://tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote.html
So, dearest tpanther, there we have it, in a nutshell, or at least compared with the length of the original essay, a nutshell. I do encourage you to read it in its entirety. You will be edified, trust me. Anyway, to misquote or misattribute such a commonly misattributed saying is a small matter, after all, to err is human, but to do so in such a predictable way is a bit more disappointing wouldn't you say?
And let's not forget, Burke was a Whig, a liberal in his time. For words he never wrote to be so often used as a rallying call of the far right just oozes irony. Were he alive today, apart from being very, very wrinkly, I think Burke would be a tad miffed.
And finally, on the subject of wrinkles, since we're getting along so well. W.H. Auden had a famously wrinkled and craggy face in his old age. He made Sitting Bull look like a poster boy for Nivea. Go here to see for yourself. According to Stephen Fry, when a young David Hockney was first introduced to him for the purpose of producing a portrait of the great poet, Hockney exclaimed (and if you can do this in a Yorkshire accent, so much the better)
"Blimey, if that's his face then what can his scrotum look like?"
(Fry, Stephen "QI" Series 2 Episode 8, UKTV, first broadcast 19 Nov 2004)
Pip pip,
A
