It is always we, the people, who teach those in power how they may treat us and what we are prepared to accept.

No power knows at the outset which of their values, dignity and rights its people are prepared to lose while continuing to remain silent.

Sometimes oppression stands openly before us and asks us to look directly at it and, by lowering our heads and kneeling in silence, to declare our final loyalty and servitude.

At such moments it does not matter what we feel about such oppression in private or what we think to ourselves. The only thing that will matter is the action we ultimately choose.

If we remain silent in order not to be seen and not to be harmed, it is not true that we are saying nothing. We are shouting our fear, our surrender and our readiness to accept open oppression and to live upon our knees, within falsehood, for the rest of our lives.

The habit of silence can become a cancer that slowly, little by little, kills our spirit. Silence and indifference will become an ocean between us that will eventually drown us all.

There are moments in life when, if the courageous expression of truth is replaced by silence, silence becomes nothing other than the final domination of falsehood.

We may not know what we should do, but if we look into the depths of our heart we will see that there is one thing we know clearly: if we remain silent, we have weakened in this world the truth that has spoken to us in a clear voice.

There are moments when our failure to appear is itself the concealment of truth.

Let us not remain silent. Sometimes an avalanche begins with a single voice, if that voice is loud enough.

Aydin Areta