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.
Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.
To define yourself is to limit yourself. Without labels you remain the infinite being.
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents
It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.
Our sadness wonβt be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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