Richard Edelman Quotes

Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.

Silence is complicity. I believe that.

To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.

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

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

Silence is complicity. Speak now or surrender your ground.

Some must speak and some must be still so that we can listen to the voices of the just and the silence of the sinners.

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name. It's not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgment of yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues.

To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.

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

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

You can't remain inactive in the face of injustice without, to some extent, being guilty of it.

Silence is consent. And silence where life and liberty is at stake, where by a timely protest we could stay the destoyer's hand, and do not do so, is as criminal as giving actual aid to the oppressor, for it answers his purpose.

Passivity is the same as defending injustice.

Evil prospers when good men do nothing.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Don't you know that silence supports the accuser's charge?

A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.