Complicity Quotes

• You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Distance, Vegetarianism, Ethics

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Barbara L. Packer, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson (2003). “The Conduct of Life”, p.4, Harvard University Press

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• Most evil in the world is only partly because of an evil person. Most of it is because of the complicity of bystanders.

  Tim Kaine

  Bystanders, Evil, World

  Source: www.cosmopolitan.com

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• Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the opressor.

  Ginetta Sagan

  Justice, Silence, Faces

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• We know that silence equals consent when atrocities are committed against innocent men, women and children. We know that indifference equals complicity when bigotry, hatred and intolerance are allowed to take root. And we know that education and hope are the most effective ways to combat ignorance and despair.

  Gabrielle Giffords

  Children, Ignorance, Men

  "Giffords Tragedy: What’s the Message to Young Women Considering Public Service?" by Gloria Feldt, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 11, 2011.

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• There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.

  Paul Bourget

  Blindness, Conditions

  Paul Bourget (1893). “Cosmopolis”, p.152, Library of Alexandria

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• Silence is complicity. Speak now or surrender your ground.

  Michelle Malkin

  Silence, Speak, Surrender

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• All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.

  Bell Hooks

  Silence, Racist, Faces

  "Killing Rage: Ending Racism". Book by Bell Hooks, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 15, 1995.

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• If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Guilty

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• All share complicity in the destruction of that much under-rated phenomenon called liberty.

  Barbara Amiel

  Liberty, Share, Destruction

  "Barbara Amiel quote" by Litera.co.uk, November 19, 2008.

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• I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

  Tahar Ben Jelloun

  Needs, World, Injustice

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• What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

  Albert Camus

  Secret, Everyday, Logical

  Albert Camus (1955). “The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays”

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• The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

  Susan Sontag

  Worst Case Scenario, Needs, Taste

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• It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality.

  Steven Biko

  People, Personality, Realizing

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• The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

  James Dickey

  Sex, Feelings, Intimacy

  James Dickey (1984). “Sorties”, p.95, LSU Press

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• Acting is the work of two people - it's only possible when you have the complicity, the help, even the manipulation of a director.

  Victoria Abril

  Two, People, Acting

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Silence,they say,is the voice of complicity. But silence is impossible. Silence screams. Silence is the message,just as doing nothing is an act. Let who you are ring out and resonate in every word and deed. Yes,become who you are. There's no sidestepping your own being or your own responsibility. What you do is who you are. You are your own comeuppance. You become your own message. You are the message. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.

  Leonard Peltier

  Horse, Crazy, Native American

  Leonard Peltier (2016). “Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance”, p.216, St. Martin's Griffin

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• Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

  Toni Morrison

  Running, School, Cities

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.258, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. This view of the attorney's position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a fee for assenting.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Views, Knowing, Matter

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2352, Delphi Classics

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• While a strong presence on our southern border is imperative, the border cannot be secured unless we enforce our internal laws and stop ignoring the open complicity of U.S. companies and foreign nations to promote illegal activities.

  Elton Gallegly

  Strong, Illegal Activities, Law

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• Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Agents, Violence, Victim

  Pierre Bourdieu, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (1999). “On Television”, p.17, The New Press

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• In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction.

  Tom Paulin

  Responsibility, Israel, Views

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• My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.

  Colin Firth

  Teaching, People, Grandparent

  "Colin Firth: a man of sense and sensibility" by Vanessa Thorpe, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2010.

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• Drug use, within entire teams continues unabated. It is planned and deliberate cheating, with complex methods, sophisticated substances and techniques, and the active complicity of doctors, scientists, team officials and riders. There is nothing accidental about it.

  Dick Pound

  Cheating, Team, Doctors

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• It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realise that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality. The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.

  Steven Biko

  Country, Pride, Men

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• I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Sarcastic, Hope, Sarcasm

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