Complicity

An individual is complicit in a crime if he is aware of its occurrence and has the ability to stop or report the crime, but fails to do so.

Quotes

• The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.
  • Albert Einstein, "The Negro Question," Pageant, January 1946, in The Cambridge Companion to Einstein, p. 450

• I can no longer clothe myself, whether in good clothes or cheap, without the likelihood that my clothes are made under sweat-shop conditions. ... If I send my students to pursue further study upon subjects to which I have introduced them, I must send them to receive the benefits of endowments from the hands of a besotted philanthropy, drunken and sated with the wine of life pressed from the crushed and exhausted millions who feed the modern industrial wine press. ...

  Whatever I do, whichever way I turn, I can neither feed nor clothe my family, nor take part in public affairs as a citizen, nor speak the truth as I conceive it, without being stained with the blood of my brothers and sisters; without putting my hands into the wickedness that prostitutes every sacred national and religious function.

  • George D. Herron, Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), pp. 23-24

• The economic system denies the right of the sincerest and most sympathetic to keep their hands out of the blood of their brothers. We may not go to our rest at night, or waken to our work in the morning, without bearing the burden of the communal guilt; without being ourselves creators and causes of the wrongs we seek to bear away. At every step, when we would do good, evil is present with us, and exacts its tribute from the very citadel of the soul.
  • George D. Herron, Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), pp. 24-25