Social Complicity Quotes

The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

I feel angry that I have been born into a society where, by no choice of my own, by no agreement, by no actual decision, I am inherently complicit in the destruction of the world. It is hard to do the right thing. You have to be militant. You have to be an activist. You have to be branded as green to do the right thing.

We all cry out that the world is corrupt,--and I fear too justly,--but we never reflect, what we have to thank for it, and that itis our open countenance of vice, which gives the lye to our private censures of it, which is its chief protection and encouragement.

Decency is indecency's conspiracy of silence

I hate all men, the ones because they are mean and vicious, and the others for being complaisant with the vicious ones.

I have argued tirelessly, nearly endlessly, in so many books, about the need for the social, the economic reconstruction of society. The demand that people be present themselves, that they contribute to the reorganization of society, that they own up to their own complicity in a system from which they derive benefit and advantage, often without acknowledgement, and the discomfort, the uncomfortable way in which that must be acknowledged.

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.