Weekend Words: Accomplice
"Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act."
In an interview with NBC’s Hallie Jackson, Ivanka Trump disputed a headline that appeared this week in the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, which referred to her as the President’s “loyal accomplice”: “I don’t like the word ‘accomplice’ because in this context, I don’t know that that’s productive. One of the things that I value about my father, as first a businessman and now as the leader of our country, is that he curates ideas and he likes to hear from people with divergent viewpoints. And that’s not always true in politics. It’s actually seldom true.”
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
—Marquis de la Grange
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one’s own unnecessary vegetation.
—Gail Sheehy
The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.
—Bess Myerson
Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.
—Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book”
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
—Joseph Conrad
The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices. It is impossible to see behind defeat, the sacrifices, the austere performance of duty, the self-discipline and the vigilance that are there
—Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras (1942)
He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself an accomplice to liars and forgers.
—Charles Peguy, “Letter to a Provincial”
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.
—Antonin Artaud
If you talk to me soon
I’ll be your accomplice in words
And we will talk only in verse
Talk only in verse.
—Stuart Murdoch, for Belle and Sebastian, “Enter Sylvia Plath”
Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act.
—The Talmud
A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims… but accomplices.
—George Orwell
Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
—Elie Wiesel, Nobel Acceptance Speech
No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
—Edward R. Murrow on Senator Joseph McCarthy, See It Now, March 7, 1954
