Unleashing Evil By Appeasement and Apathy

While drafting a potential new editorial, I came across this quote from Ayn Rand that I didn't recall, but that's very important (as is so much of what she wrote):

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

From: The Objectivist “Altruism as Appeasement,” The Objectivist, Jan. 1966, 6