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Do you believe that if you take care of enough people, Danny mused, eventually someone will notice and finally decide to take care of you? (...)

Kathy Labriola recommends that people ask themselves why they want to help people in need, and what they expect to get out of helping. “We all have a mix of healthy and unhealthy motives for doing things,” she says, “and that’s okay. But you do want to get a sense of what the ratio is there.”

— Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

I'm reminded of a quote often attributed to Irish statesman Edmund Burke that's often shared with children when they first learn about the Holocaust: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." It's a powerful statement about the necessity of standing up against evil, and I think a lot of kids connect with the words when they first hear them. Leaders of all stripes call on this quote to justify some of their boldest actions. Doing something is better than doing nothing, after all. At the very heart of the quote and its popularity is the Laziness Lie lurking within it: it says doing nothing is akin to condoning evil.

There's a problem with this quote, though: Edmund Burke never appears to have said it. In fact, no one knows where the quote came from. It seems to have been made up, then widely adopted by a variety of political leaders, activists, and nonprofit directors throughout the world. Burke's actual words are far less individualistic: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

This is not a statement about how "good men" must be active and engaged in order to fight evil head-on; rather, it's a call for good people to band together and stand firm against the evil forces attacking them. This quote doesn't praise activity for the sake of activity, it praises community.

— Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price