Complicity Quotes

Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable.

The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package - the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity - must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug.

The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

Now, the other pillar of Israeli power - Western support and complicity - is starting to crack. We must do all we can to push it over.

Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.

I never use a telephoto lens. I need to be close to people. I need their complicity; I need them to be aware that I am there taking their picture. I hate paparazzi.

The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.

If global warming is not contained, the West will face a choice of a refugee crisis of unimaginable proportions, or direct complicity in crimes against humanity.

The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others.

Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.

It should be not only a synergy, but a complicity between the viewer and the artist, and so I'm wide open to that.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

The first sign of tyranny is government's complicity in privatizing the commons for private gain.

The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Silence is complicity. Speak now or surrender your ground.

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

I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.

Once a citizen receives a direct payment from the state, the state has purchased their complicity

Resolved, That we especially protest against this present attempt to force all the people to follow the religious dictates of a part of the people, as establishing a precedent for the entrance of a most dangerous complicity between Church and State, thereby subtly undermining the foundation of liberty, so carefully laid by the wisdom of our fathers.

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.

I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

Every time you prefer the pleasures of this world to the joys of heaven, you spit in the face of Christ; every time when to gain in your business, you do an unrighteous thing, you are like Judas selling Him for thirty pieces of silver; every time you make a false profession of religion, you give Him a traitor's kiss; every word you have spoken against Him, every hard thought you have had of Him, has helped to complete your complicity with the great crowd which gathered around the Cross of Calvary, to mock and jeer the Lord of life and glory.

There is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession.

The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder.

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

My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity especially on the situation in Gaza shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma

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

…“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”- a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white supremacist control” over other black people.

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.

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

It must now atone in blood for its complicity in wickedness.

We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America. Period.

In any group there is more or less tension between people, and there are complicities and affinities.

This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion

Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.

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.

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

My strong sense of discipline has always been with me, and it also gave me the need for deep affection. I have never been satisfied with acquaintances who are superficial, volatile, or quick to change. I have surrounded myself with people with whom I am in total complicity.

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.

Men We Reaped is a fiercely felt meditation on the value of life that at once reminds us of its infinite worth and indicts us - as a society - for our selective, casual complicity in devaluing it. Ward's account of these losses is founded in a compelling emotional honesty, and graced with moments of stark poetry.