Moral Complicity Quotes

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends... ...when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.

Could this country stand by and watch the [most] direct crime that ever stained the face of history, and thus become participators in the sin.

The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious — as when a scientist works on nerve gases — he cannot properly claim that such applications are "none of his business," merely on the ground that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill.

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—-though naturally to differing extents-—responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing.

The illegal immigrants may have broken the law, but we have been complicit.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.

While admiring the pleasing evidence of wealth, we become complicit in - or, at the very least, recognize the extent to which we, too, are beneficiaries of - an economic system we routinely deplore.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

How different has been the course pursued by the Unitarian party. How few of that numerous body, powerful from wealth and education, whether ministers or laymen, have placed themselves by the side of the suffering bondman. The freedom of discussion, which was fearlessly applied to metaphysical doctrines and theological subtleties, was found to be a dangerous weapon when it was used for the examination of an institution, the ramification of which entwined themselves around every altar of mammon worship

Journalists grow accustomed to seeing evil and they let it pass; they proceed to approve it, and they end by committing it themselves.

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

I've seen things, and that's almost the same as doing them.

If somebody murders somewhere, I have a part in it. Even if I am a sleeper - I was sleeping, I don´t know about the man, I will never hear about him - and somebody somewhere, in the Himalayas, commits a murder, if we are not individuals I have a part in it, I am also responsible. It is not so easy to throw the responsibility: "I am not committing a murder, I am a saint." No saint is a saint because every sinner is implied in him.

If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I'm complicit.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Complicity with error will take from the best of men the power to enter any successful protest against it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

I didn't invent the culture, but I didn't try to stop the culture.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.

What kind of times are they, when A talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors?