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.
Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder β people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world β or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.
Mary's life was a perfect imitation of Jesus. She was humble, hidden, sorrowful and afflicted, but she also knew joys that never entered the heart of man. She is all things to all men that she might understand their failings, though she failed not.
The measure of every manβs virtue is best revealed in time of adversity - adversity that does not weaken a man but rather shows what he is.
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
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