As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a lack of accountability leads to violence and a culture that condones such behavior.
Simone Weil's quote highlights the inherent dangers of a society where individuals believe they can act violently without facing consequences. It implies that when people feel they can kill with impunity, they are likely to either commit acts of violence themselves or condone such behaviors in others, fostering an environment that encourages brutality and moral decay.
In practice
In a discussion on societal norms and violence, this quote can illustrate the consequences of a lack of accountability.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
When you and I hurt deeply, what we really need is not an explanation from God but a revelation of God. We need to see how great God is; we need to recover our lost perspective on life. Things get out of proportion when we are suffering, and it takes a vision of something bigger than ourselves to get life's dimensions adjusted again
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality fo result. Its equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.
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