"Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government"
About this Quote
Violence doesn’t need a manifesto when it has a filing system. Benenson’s line turns the daily newspaper into an indictment: not of one regime, but of a global, routine machinery that treats conscience as contraband. The genius is in the casualness of “Open your newspaper - any day of the week.” He isn’t summoning rare catastrophe; he’s pointing to a dependable pattern, as predictable as weather or sports scores. Horror becomes a recurring column.
Benenson, a lawyer, writes like someone building a case for a jury that has gotten used to the evidence. The sentence stacks verbs - “imprisoned, tortured or executed” - with the steady rhythm of procedure, implying escalation is baked into the logic of state power. Then he slips in the key phrase: “because his opinions or religion are unacceptable.” Not illegal, not harmful, not violent. Unacceptable. The subtext is bureaucratic moralism: governments recasting personal belief as public threat, then laundering repression through the language of order.
Context sharpens the intent. Benenson’s public work helped catalyze Amnesty International in the early 1960s, an era when Cold War blocs and postcolonial states alike policed dissent and treated “security” as a blank check. The quote is less a lament than a recruitment pitch: if this is in the paper every day, then outrage can’t be occasional. He’s arguing that the scandal isn’t just cruelty; it’s normalcy - and that citizenship, at minimum, requires refusing to let the headline dissolve into background noise.
Benenson, a lawyer, writes like someone building a case for a jury that has gotten used to the evidence. The sentence stacks verbs - “imprisoned, tortured or executed” - with the steady rhythm of procedure, implying escalation is baked into the logic of state power. Then he slips in the key phrase: “because his opinions or religion are unacceptable.” Not illegal, not harmful, not violent. Unacceptable. The subtext is bureaucratic moralism: governments recasting personal belief as public threat, then laundering repression through the language of order.
Context sharpens the intent. Benenson’s public work helped catalyze Amnesty International in the early 1960s, an era when Cold War blocs and postcolonial states alike policed dissent and treated “security” as a blank check. The quote is less a lament than a recruitment pitch: if this is in the paper every day, then outrage can’t be occasional. He’s arguing that the scandal isn’t just cruelty; it’s normalcy - and that citizenship, at minimum, requires refusing to let the headline dissolve into background noise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Peter Benenson, "The Forgotten Prisoners" (article), The Observer, 28 May 1961 — founding article for Amnesty International containing the line beginning "Open your newspaper..." |
More Quotes by Peter
Add to List
