If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Making excuses for injustice leads to supporting oppression, executioners, and betraying humanity. Silence or leniency enables great harm.
- In plain terms
- If you keep making excuses for bad things, you end up supporting oppressors and betraying people.
- What can you take from it?
- Excusing evil leads to complicity and betrayal.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- When does excuse become complicity?
- How to speak against harm?
Another view
Sometimes forgiveness or nuance is needed too.
More from Albert Camus
If our age admits, with equanimity, that murder has its justifications, it is because of this indifference to life which is the mark of nihilism.
Permalink to quote #150 If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Permalink to quote #152 If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession…
Permalink to quote #149
Related quotes
I myself won't do anything, but I won't stop anyone else from acting.
Walther von BrauchitschWalther von Brauchitsch quote #3 A day will come when the world will find the Wehrmacht responsible for these methods, inasmuch as the things happen with our tacit consent.
Wilhelm CanarisWilhelm Canaris quote #8 Schacht is a disappointment because of another thing. If I would have had the terrible secrets of crimes committed by the Nazis in my hands, which Schacht said…
Hjalmar SchachtHjalmar Schacht quote #10