Complicity Quotes

“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others”
― Iain M. Banks, Complicity

“A thousand times, people may have touched each other, but never ever sensed a single vein of oneness or complicity in the wilderness of their inner world, since obdurate mental impediments have been barricading the road to understanding and propinquity. ( “A thousand times” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“A dog can be a ‘significant other’ as it infuses a magic fluid stream of oxytocin, trust, ease, and patience; and transforms a man’s life into a paradise of complicity and mutual sympathy, arousing at the same time an instinct of playfulness that many people have lost since their young age and that puts things in new perspectives.(" I am young and have no dog ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It is complicated,’ they say. I am so sick of this response. Many people use it repeatedly to escape depth and confronting reality. They use it to take solace in the fact that they don’t know (or don’t wish to know) the ugly truth of what is happening right in front of their eyes. They reduce crimes, injustice, war, pain, hunger, rape, and everything that must be unpacked, dissected, and confronted to this: ‘It is complicated.’ They say this about COVID-19, too. Oh, how I have grown to hate this response. Every time I hear this statement from someone, it sounds like ‘I am a loser’ to my ears. ‘It is complicated’ is the favorite response of lazy brains that refuse to think and do. Oh, my friends, I insist it is not complicated. If you really want to know, it is not so complicated. However, if you are really looking for reasons and excuses to justify your silence, complicity, and to protect your self-interest, then you are absolutely right – it is complicated!”
― Louis Yako

“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.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“Ideas often dance a capella”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Looking from the outside in, one cannot see, for example, whether people attend a parade because they are forced to do so or because they so desire. Researchers generally assumed one or the other: either that people were passive victims or that they were fervent believers. But on the inside, both assumptions were wrong, for all the people at the parade (or any other form of collective action) and for each one of them individually. They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need.... They would not be lying if they said that they wanted to be a part of the parade, or the collective in general - and that if they exerted pressure on others to be a part of the collective too, they did so willingly. But this did not make them true believers in the ideology, in the way Westerners might imagine it: the ideology served simply as a key to unity, as the collective's shared language. In addition, the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to [Hannah] Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology - it was their home, and it felt ordinary.”
― Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

“Power is a poison.”
― Neil Sharpson, When the Sparrow Falls

“В Германии практически каждый знал о Холокосте — ведь он начался с массовых убийств в Восточной Европе, в которых приняли непосредственное участие десятки тысяч немцев. Сотни тысяч, если не миллионы, знали об этом; вероятно, чуть ли не каждый немецкий солдат на Восточном фронте. И мы знаем, что они писали об этом домой. Я полагаю, что Холокост как факт был широко известен задолго до того, как был устроен Освенцим. А после войны пришли американцы и британцы и обнаружили лагеря смерти. И они спросили у немцев:" Вы знали об этом? "И получили вполне правдивый ответ:" Нет, мы не знали точно, что там происходило ". Так лагеря заслонили собой Холокост. И по сегодняшний день Холокост у немцев ассоциируется прежде всего с лагерями смерти, хотя на самом деле он был сравнительно мало связан с ними [161].”
― Timothy Snyder, Украинская история, российская политика, европейское будущее

“Madame, he said, when Aunt Theodosia finished her story and flashed her famous medal around the room, do you realize King Leopold cut the hands off workers who, in the opinion of his plantation overseers did not fulfill their rubber quota? Rather than cherish that medal, Madame, you should regard it as a symbol of your unwitting complicity with this despot who worked to death and brutalized and eventually exterminated thousands and thousands of African peoples.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Why solicit more assaults from critics, many in the highest parts of our government, who have deliberately attempted to distract attention from the real issue of a compromised president’s corrupt complicity in Russian interference? Especially when, aside from required testimony, I have stayed silent for years. First out of duty to the FBI’s rules and then to protect and respect an ongoing investigation. Because the Russians haven’t gone away.”
― Peter Strzok, Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump

“[D]uring all my university years in the U.S. (doing a master’s and a doctorate degrees), I often noticed that young people were totally quiet when issues like wars and crimes against humanity in the Middle East came up, but they were very active and vocal when issues like recycling, environment, or global warming came up. While all these issues are important, the silences and complicity displayed on some issues rather than others; the selectivity of expressing resistance and rage are hypocritical, to say the least. I found that many choose to be active in what one could consider safe and convenient causes. How can I take seriously enraged rich and privileged students who want us to protect the environment by recycling a plastic bottle, yet it never occurs to them that all the bombs and weapons used in the Middle East are doing a serious damage to their beloved planet? Last time I checked we all live on one planet, unless these privileged students truly live on a different planet.”
― Louis Yako

“She was wildfire; I was wind”
― Wiss Auguste, Beneath The Veil Of Time: A poetry collection

“as for those of you who are complicit, it is not you that I want to destroy, but your shackles”
― Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady

“Considering the way American education is going in the direction of commercialization and corporatization speaks volumes about how education is getting hijacked; it is being turned into a tool of oppression and creating wider gaps between the rich and the poor rather than fulfilling its purpose of setting minds and bodies free.”
― Louis Yako

“The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. social scientists active in psychological warfare were not ignorant of their role, or of the violence that usually accompanied psychological operations. They were, rather," insulated, "just as Biderman and Crawford say, from consideration of the implications of their work.”
― Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960

“We have become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.”
― Louis Yako

“Di glanced around to see if anyone was coming to stop this, but the Messiers stood calmly at their posts, and the people outside the mob simply looked away. As though if they did not see the violence, they would not be a part of it. But he saw them. He saw all the people who averted their eyes and walked past, and all the ones crowded into the circle, spitting and hissing at a Metal who could not defend itself.”
― Ashley Poston, Heart of Iron

“A passionate Marxist journalist - waiting for the revolution, rejecting all 'palliatives' - told me that the 'workers' of India had to be politicized; they had to be told that it was the 'system' that oppressed them. After nearly thirty years of power, the Congress has, understandably, become the system. But where does the system begin and end? Does it take in religion, the security of caste and clan, Indian ways of perceiving, karma, the antique serfdom? But no Indian cares to take political self-examination that far. No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians. Even the Marxists, dreaming of a revolution occurring like magic on a particular day, of tyranny swept away, of 'the people' then engaging in the pleasures of 'folk' activities - the Marxist journalist's word: the folk miraculously whole after the millennia of oppression - even the Marxist's vision of the future is not of a country undone and remade but of an India essentially returned to itself, purified: a vision of Ramraj.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“[Long Life]
This famous writer has died at 92
And that legend journalist,
The darling of authorities and mainstream media,
Has died at 95.
This pious religious man
Has died at 96,
And that billionaire,
Known for his countless charities and charitable deeds
Has died at 96 also…
The veteran and shrewd politician,
The former president of that country,
Has died at 95 as well…
And the same questions that dawned on me
Ever since I understood the oppression & filthiness
Of what the elites, authorities, and those in power are capable of,
Begin ringing in my ears once again:
Can anyone aware of the ugliness of what is going on live a long life?
Is it a coincidence that most people, writers, and artists
Who enriched my awareness and world died prematurely
Or died, literally or metaphorically, by suicide, assassination, or in prison?
Can a shred of awareness fell upon us without defeating the body and the soul
Cell by cell and one organ after another causing a premature death?
I also wonder have the writers, journalists, religious men, and politicians
Who lived long lives enriched truth and justness,
Or have they gotten rich at the expense of the above
to live long lives up to 92, 93, 94, 95, & 96?
And by biggest questions of all:
Is there somewhere, in some world, in some place,
a dagger of awareness that stabs without the killing the stabbed prematurely?

[Original poem published in Arabic on December 31, 2022, at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Nothing in this world scares me
More than applause!
Yes, I suffer from what can be called
‘Acute Applause Syndrome’!
Applause the bread of the hypocrites
The talent of the frauds
The compliments of liars
For other liars…”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“Nothing in this world scares me
More than applause!
Yes, I suffer from what can be called
‘Acute Applause Syndrome’!
Applause the bread of the hypocrites
The talent of the frauds
The compliments of liars
For other liars…
…
Each time I hear an applause,
I’m reminded of all the dirty hands
That applauded
Wars
Genocide
And massacres…
I’m reminded of all the hands that applauded
Political parties
Ideologies
And religions
That kills humanity and humans every day…
I feel the clappers holding my breath
And raping me in daylight…”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“With all our eyes, we don't see.
With all our ears, we don't hear.
With all our tongues, we don't speak.
With all our limbs, we still disappear.

We turn our eyes where we need to see,
We shut our ears where we need to listen.
We chain our tongue where we need a voice,
We freeze our feet where we need movement.

It's time to thaw the freeze,
It's time to break the silence.
It's time we hearken to cries,
It's time we walk as guardians.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“What is the point of you? What is your worth? And by worth I am not talking about your financial value, I am talking about something much more significant than that. So, I ask again - what is your worth? And you won't find the answer in any scripture or church - you won't find it even in this book. Because no external power can give you the answer to something so incredibly existential in nature.

If you want to know your worth, ask yourself, what are you without your bank account. The worth of a person lies in character. The same goes for a nation and the same goes for a world. Therefore, a nation's worth lies not in the value of its currency, but in the character of its people. And it all begins with the individual - it all begins with you. Your character holds not just the worth of your own life, but that of the lives of your people as well. So, feel like it's the feeling of your society and act like it's the action of your society.

But mark you, here I do not mean, feeling and acting like the society, rather, I am asking you to feel, think and act as an original, brave and conscientious human being, so that you become the very emblem of humanhood in front of others, for them to draw their life’s inspiration from. Doing what the society wants, makes you a second hand human - wanting the society to do what you want, makes you a narcissistic bigot - but being an embodiment of humanhood without any expectation from others, is what makes you a sentient human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Every Generation Needs Caretakers: The Gospel of Patriotism

“Silent Messages 4

Nobody wants to change the world…
Everyone wants to ensure
Receiving just one more paycheck
Just one more…

[Original poem published in Arabic on May 16, 2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako”
― Louis Yako

“The Silence Game"
Many have understood the game
and chose to remain silent…
They chose silence thinking
that their silence will save them…
Yet silence killed them through heart attacks,
without even giving them a chance
to scream at least one last time
to inform the world that
silence is much more costly
than resistance…

[Original poem published in Arabic on December 11, 2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me - halting, hesitating - that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.”
― Carmel Mc Mahon, In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History

“Departure"
Everyone wants to leave
Those here want to go there,
and many there are eager to return here…
There are those who understood that living is not possible
neither here nor there,
so, you see them, in vain, searching for alternatives…
Few have understood that the impossibility of living
is a result of complicity not geography,
that most of those who stay or depart
never part ways with their complicity and tendency to surrender,
thus, they recreate the circumstances and the causes of departure
everywhere they go…
Few have understood that all places will remain unlivable
so long as the causes to depart are a result
of a complicit and defeated Self…


[Original poem published in Arabic on June 20, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako