There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place? — William S. Burroughs
What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander. — Elie Wiesel
Most evil in the world is only partly because of an evil person. Most of it is because of the complicity of bystanders. — Tim Kaine
There are no bystanders in life [...] Our humanity makes us each a part of something greater than ourselves. — Sonia Sotomayor
Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse. — Philip Zimbardo
The world is made up not only of good and evil, but also of those who do nothing. — Alexei Navalny
The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
All of us are subject to being passive to the social ills around us. It's a struggle not to become, by staying silent, an accomplice. — Mary Travers
The greater the number of people present, the less likely an individual is to help someone in need because it is easier to rationalize that someone else will do it. — Gad Saad
The worst people on earth are not only those who commit evil, but those who stand by and turn a blind eye — Emmanuel Jal
There is a 3rd point of view on the gun control issue - those who I refer to as THE VICTIMS - but they remain strangely silent. — Bill Hicks
Heroes are Ordinary People whose social action is Extra-Ordinary/ who ACT when others are passive, who give up EGO-centrism for SOCIO-centrism. — Philip Zimbardo
Short Bystanders Quotes
There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders. — Curtis LeMay
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. — Elie Wiesel
A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Riot – A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders. — Ambrose Bierce
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. — Elie Wiesel
And Thou shalt never, but never be a bystander. — Yehuda Bauer
The measure of a civilization is in the courage, not of its soldiers, but of its bystanders. — Jack McDevitt
Don't settle! Embrace a dream--and keep dreaming. Don't be a bystander. Take it personally. — Howard Schultz
Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders. — Seth Godin
Don't sit back and be a bystander of your own life — Caprice Crane
Holocaust Quotes
Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. — Elie Wiesel
We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy. — Heinrich Himmler
Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions. — Primo Levi
The Holocaust is a great warning to us all. We shall never forget our sisters and brothers. We have to ensure it is not repeated and to ensure we never go back to the days when humans behaved as beasts. Forgetfulness is a menace, we must remember. — Shimon Peres
I come from a people who gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Time has come to strenghten them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander. — Yehuda Bauer
The President of Iran has called for the destruction of Israel and the West and has even denied the holocaust took place. Iran and its terrorist arm Hezbollah are responsible for the current conflicts between Israel and Lebanon. — Michael McCaul
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals. — Theodor Adorno
It's here, where absolute evil was perpetrated, that the will must resurface for a fraternal world, a world based on respect of man and his dignity. — Simone Veil
Honoring the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, in which more than two million Ukrainian Jews died, Ukraine calls on Israel to also recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. — Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Night Quotes
And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us. — Pablo Neruda
The energy in the daytime is so different because everyone is so unhappy and depressed and you can pick up on that energy psychokinetically. So I like to come out at night. Everything's settled, you can see more. — Kevin Gates
I know it seems hard sometimes but remember one thing. Through every dark night, there's a bright day after that. So no matter how hard it get, stick your chest out, keep ya head up.... and handle it. — Tupac Shakur
Six hours' sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool. — Napoleon Bonaparte
Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is foreseeing. It is looking at the thorn and seeing rose, looking at the night and seeing the day. Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full. — Shams Tabrizi
Every night when I go out on stage, there's always one nagging fear in the back of my mind. I'm always afraid that somewhere out there, there is one person in the audience that I'm not going to offend! — Don Rickles
Last night
I begged the Wise One to tell me
the secret of the world.
Gently, gently, he whispered,
"Be quiet,
the secret cannot be spoken,
It is wrapped in silence." — Rumi
Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better. — Henry Rollins
A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. — Bob Dylan
Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me? — Alain de Botton
With madness, as with vomit, it's the passerby who receives the inconvenience. — Joe Orton
In every passerby, everywhere - Christ . . . He is in everyone - there can be no outcasts. — Caryll Houselander
I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life. — Mary Roberts Rinehart
If you are a blackman in America and get stopped by the police, make sure you have a vidio camera. Don't rely on some passerby to film the beating. Rodney King was just lucky. — Don King
You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Beggars beg to get money, not to reproach the passerby. — Mason Cooley
Abraham Lincoln once walked down the street with his two sons, both of whom were crying. "What's the matter with you boys?" asked a passerby. "Exactly what is wrong with the whole world," said Lincoln. "I have three walnuts, and each boy wants two." — George Sweeting
At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a passerby, next lingered for a moment, then came as a visitor, and finally became master of the house. — Israel Shenker
I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it. — Bernard Berenson
If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. — Judith Lewis Herman
Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me. — Edward Hoagland
Someone should advise women to stop fantasizing about courageous firefighters and heroic uniformed soldiers. There is a new sheriff in town who epitomizes a progressive definition of masculinity: Apathetic Cowardly Bystander Man. — Gad Saad
He was breakfasting in the marketplace, and the bystanders gathered round him with cries of "dog." "It is you who are dogs," cried he, "when you stand round and watch me at my breakfast." — Diogenes
History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders. — Edna O'Brien
The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders. — Yehuda Bauer
All male animals, including men, when they are in love, are apt to behave in ways that seem ludicrous to bystanders. — Francis Galton
Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now. — Jhumpa Lahiri
Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost 5,000 dollars. Because if a bullet cost five thousand dollar, we wouldn't have any innocent bystanders. — Chris Rock
In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes. — Thomas Paine
But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps. — Beryl Markham
The future is in our hands. We are not hapless bystanders. We can influence whether we have a planet of peace, social justice, equity, and growth or a planet of unbridgeable differences between peoples, wasted resources, corruption, and terror. — James Wolfensohn
Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state. — Daniel Goleman
Bystanders wandered in and out of the merchant's stall, passing the time, talking of dreams they might purchase. Workers and slaves stooped from labor asked timidly for dreams of wine and ease. Women asked for dreams of love, and men for dreams of women. — David Berlinski
One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander's last meal. — Stephen King
Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander. You have the power to increase his perceptions and conceptions. — Dorothea Lange
To a bystander like me, those who made 190 million pounds deliberately underselling the shares of HBOS, in spite of its very strong capital base, and drove it into the bosom of Lloyds TSB Bank, are clearly bank robbers and asset strippers. — John Sentamu
It is not open to the cool bystander . . . to set himself up as an impartial judge of events which would never have occurred had he outstretched a helping hand in time. — Winston Churchill
Sometimes the spirit is playing you. I call it following the will of the music, and when that feeling shows up, you just go with it. It's almost like I'm a bystander. I'm watching this happening, and it's not a mental process. It's just spontaneous. — Charlie Musselwhite
Yes, the investor is often his own worst enemy. Yes, the marketing colossus known as the mutual fund industry provides the weaponry which enables investors to indulge their suicidal instincts. No, the fund industry was hardly an innocent bystander in the market boom and the subsequent carnage. "We have met the enemy and he is us"... all of us. — John C. Bogle
To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate. — Mark Steyn
The man who could withstand, with his fellow-men in single line, a charge of cavalry may lose all command of himself on the occurrence of a fire in his own house, because of some homely reminiscence unknown to the observing bystander. — Arthur Helps
I don't consider myself to be a crusader of any sort. I was bystander to a certain number of newspaper crusades. They end badly, in terms of being either fraudulent or by inspiring legislations that makes things worse. So, I regard myself as someone coming to the campfire with the truest possible narrative he can acquire. — David Simon
We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct. — William James
Business leaders cannot be bystanders. — Howard Schultz
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of bystanders quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about bystanders to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of bystanders quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.