"I hate victims who respect their executioners"
About this Quote
Sartre’s line lands like a slap because it refuses the comfort of innocence. “Victims” are supposed to earn automatic moral reverence; Sartre denies that reflex, not by absolving executioners, but by indicting a particular posture among the oppressed: deference. The verb “respect” is the poison pill. It signals an internalized hierarchy, a consent that doesn’t look like consent, the kind produced by fear, dependency, and the everyday training of people to admire the power that hurts them.
The intent is existentialist and political at once. Sartre is obsessed with freedom under constraint: even when the world corners you, you still have choices, and those choices have ethical weight. Respecting your executioner becomes, in his frame, a way of fleeing responsibility - swapping the hard work of revolt for the easier script of submission dressed up as civility, gratitude, “realism,” or even spiritual virtue. He’s attacking bad faith: the self-deception that turns domination into fate and survival strategies into principles.
Context matters: Sartre wrote in the shadow of WWII, fascism, collaboration, and later the blood-soaked arguments around colonialism and liberation. The sentence carries the heat of those debates, especially his impatience with bourgeois morality that prizes order over justice. Its cynicism is strategic. By making the victim uncomfortable, he tries to strip away sentimental politics and force a harsher question: if oppression persists partly through the oppressed learning to admire their oppressors, what does dignity require - and what does it cost?
The intent is existentialist and political at once. Sartre is obsessed with freedom under constraint: even when the world corners you, you still have choices, and those choices have ethical weight. Respecting your executioner becomes, in his frame, a way of fleeing responsibility - swapping the hard work of revolt for the easier script of submission dressed up as civility, gratitude, “realism,” or even spiritual virtue. He’s attacking bad faith: the self-deception that turns domination into fate and survival strategies into principles.
Context matters: Sartre wrote in the shadow of WWII, fascism, collaboration, and later the blood-soaked arguments around colonialism and liberation. The sentence carries the heat of those debates, especially his impatience with bourgeois morality that prizes order over justice. Its cynicism is strategic. By making the victim uncomfortable, he tries to strip away sentimental politics and force a harsher question: if oppression persists partly through the oppressed learning to admire their oppressors, what does dignity require - and what does it cost?
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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