Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian, writing from Flossenberg prison prior to his execution for plotting to kill Adolph Hitler:
We have been silent witnesses to evil deeds. We have become cunning and learnt the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? Geniuses, cynics, people who feel contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, are not what we will need but simple, uncomplicated and honest human beings. Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?
Cited by Dr. Larry James. Living with the fear of reprisal, writing and speaking under surveillance, in a state of exception, with the Constitution suspended in order to protect it, intricate becomes the langauge of the oppressed. The pariah speaks in tongues, in parables, fables, allegories, and dark sayings. Comes the moment when plain truth flashes out, and the consequences are irrevocable. If you compare Bonhoeffer's moral biography to that of our philanthropists, you see how paltry a thing is wealth. The Journey from Success to Significance took Bonhoeffer to the gallows. That in my experience is not how philanthropists see things panning out for them. When Dr. Paul Schervish, a former Jesuit, writes of the wealthy and their moral biographies, I wonder if figures like Bonhoeffer, or for that matter Christ, cross his mind, and make him pause, sick at heart, and full of disgust at what we do to flatter the delusions of wealth. We will not cure our time until we cure ourselves. Not that I am anything but ill: afraid, weak, an ennabler still.