When you turn a blind eye to atrocities, you are complicit in them.

When you give in to bullies, you don't just empower them, you encourage whatever methods they employ to achieve their ends; usually terror and violence. Meaning it's the innocent who pay; mourners at a funeral in Baghdad, a group of Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya, a group of defenseless school children in Pakistan. When we turn a blind eye to atrocities, we are complicit in them.

To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.

Contrary to the media circus which portrayed politicians as all-powerful figures, Kentbridge knew from experience the vast majority of US Government officials – elected or otherwise – were puppets who only had the illusion of power.

I'm the president of the United States. I'm not the emperor of the United States.

Another grave fault in our election system is that the campaigns are unduly strung out. [Election Administration in the United States, 1934, page 72]