Complicity Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  Umberto Eco

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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

  Abraham Lincoln

  War, Blood, History

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

  Bergen Evans

  Essence, Witch, Proof

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• 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.

  George Tenet

  America, Als, Authority

  "George Tenet: At the center of the storm". "60 Minutes" with Scott Pelley, www.cbsnews.com. April 25, 2007.

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• 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

  Desmond Tutu

  Military, Silence, Community

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• 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.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Religious, Party, Struggle

  Abraham Lincoln (2009). “The Portable Abraham Lincoln”, p.272, Penguin

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• I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

  Cornel West

  Morning, Struggle, Recovery

  bell hooks, Cornel West (2016). “Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life”, p.125, Taylor & Francis

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

  Kiki Smith

  Remember, Hardest, Happens

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

  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

  Government, Gains, Firsts

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

  Henri Bergson

  Laughter, Real, Secret

  Henri Bergson (2013). “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic”, p.3, Courier Corporation

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

  Leonardo Drew

  Artist, Should, Synergy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  Charles Spurgeon

  Successful, Men, Errors

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• 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.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Book, People, Demand

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Errors, Names, Abuse

  Simone de Beauvoir, Gisèle Ḥalimī (1962). “Djamila Boupacha: the story of the torture of a young Algerian girl which shocked liberal French opinion”, Andre Deutsch

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• …“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.

  Bell Hooks

  Attitude, Exercise, Color

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

  Charles Hugh Smith

  Citizens, States, Payment

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• 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.

  Victor Burgin

  Photograph, Conviction

  Victor Burgin (1982). “Thinking photography”

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

  Beverly Daniel Tatum

  Responsibility, Doe, Tasks

  Beverly Daniel Tatum (1997). “"Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations about Race”, Basic Books

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• Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Shoes, Feet, Trying

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• 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.

  George Monbiot

  Refugee Crisis, Choices, Humanity

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

  Che Guevara

  Country, Socialist Countries, West

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• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Years, Long, People

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• 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

  Jean Baudrillard

  Distance, Spy, Use

  Jean Baudrillard (1998). “The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures”, p.121, SAGE

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• 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.

  Graciela Iturbide

  Hate, People, Lenses

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• If you encounter a human shadow burned permanently into the concrete in Hiroshima, you realize that this is the trace of a very ordinary person now elevated into the emblematic. Time, shame, complicity, or discomfort are the only things that make us pretend History is impersonal or far removed from the power and consequences of our every lived moment.

  Chris Abani

  Shadow, Encounters, Ordinary

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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