Quotes About Complicity

Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Neutral men are the devil's allies.

We're all in it together, Harry. We're all pieces of the fisherman. I know that sounds like a bullshit answer, but you'll see, when you start to work with the dead. Everyone's complicit: the most innocent little kiddies; babies who live a day, an hour—they still have a hand in things, even their own deaths. I know that's very hard for you to get your head around right now, but take it from someone that's spent a lot of time with death.

Elwood said, It's against the law. State law, but also Elwood's. If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That's how he saw it, how he'd always seen things.

If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest.

The Uncle Tom, the grinning nigger, the house nigger who is to blame for her debased place in this world. Pompey gave them a blueprint for colored folk. How they acted. How they pleased white folks. How eager they would be for a piece of the dream that they would do anything for massa.

If you share your friend's crime, you make it your own

That's how it worked in theory, but in reality nearly everybody was in on the deal and got a little piece of the pie for looking the other way. Before

So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.

No matter our personal dedication to goodness and justice, we are all, in greater or lesser measure, complicit in the injustices of the society which we tolerate. Even if we tolerate it for the best of reasons, it is a constant struggle not to be consumed by the self-contempt that such accommodation threatens to breed in any person of conscience.

At present, under the burden of canons and the burden of language's deep complicity with countless atrocities, the very making of poems requires audacity. And if the audacity is well-intended, it requires a certain awkwardness as proof of its unrehearsed refusal to comply with silence.

Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

Teem showed him a bitter smile. "Perhaps you had no direct hand in Kim's death, but I suspect that you were complicit." He paused, then added, "That little speech you gave in the Senate … I understand that it succeeded in attracting the attention of the Supreme Chancellor. Clearly you have all the makings of a career politician. Unfortunately, we plan to cut your career short.

would sign written statements implicating the others. Even my own

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

It's easier to accept lies by invoking a misguided alibi of tolerance and mutual respect than to live outside the cone of public approval. This is clear in every recent national debate over abortion, marriage, family, sexuality, and rights in general. Many of us are happy to live with half-truths and ambiguity rather than risk being cut out of the herd. The culture of lies thrives on our own complicity, lack of courage, and self-deception. The

Where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.

The story and every element of it . . . had been fixed long ago . . . we had literally fought to establish a single ritualized version, constant enough to double for fact. Until Tilly changed a phrase. . . . I ought to have been indignant, ought to have piped up righteously in a high, clear voice. . . . But I couldn't say it, and so made myself complicit. Tilly was the one who broke the rule' I was the one who left her.

The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what?'

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

This is an act of destruction of the self, an undoing of the self's protection. Over and over I face the wall, the way in which I must confront my own complicity. Even the smallest fragment is a great victory.

White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...