Justice & Law Quote by Bess Myerson

The sharp trick in Myerson's line is how quickly it drags the reader off the safe perch of spectator and onto the witness stand. Corruption usually arrives in our politics and workplaces wearing a villain mask, someone else's face. Myerson flips that frame: the “accomplice” isn’t the bribe-taker or the fixer; it’s the bystander who decides it’s not worth the hassle. That’s not just moral scolding. It’s a diagnosis of how corruption actually survives: not through a thousand hardened crooks, but through millions of small abdications.

“Frequently” does important work here. It sidesteps the easy rebuttal (“Sometimes you really can’t do anything”) while insisting that indifference is common enough to be structurally enabling. The phrasing also smuggles in a cultural critique: indifference can pose as sophistication. We call it being “above it,” staying “neutral,” protecting our peace. Myerson labels that posture what it often functions as: consent.

The subtext is uncomfortably practical. Corruption depends on social silence - colleagues who don’t document, voters who shrug, institutions that treat misconduct as “business as usual.” Indifference is the lubricant, the thing that keeps consequences from attaching. Even the word “our” is a strategic trap: it refuses to let readers outsource responsibility to faceless “people.”

Context matters, too. Myerson is remembered publicly as a model and civic figure, which gives the sentence its sting: it’s not an academic’s abstraction but a warning from someone who understood how reputations, power, and public complicity intertwine. The intent is to turn outrage into responsibility by making passivity feel like participation.