Dehumanization Quotes

But even though catastrophic oppression brought about a process of objectification and dehumanization, the absolute negation of humanity was not possible because a damaged human spirit seeks to resurrect and reconstruct itself; it also seeks self-consciousness. ~ Clovis E. Semmes

Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. ~ William Shakespeare

Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives. ~ Bell Hooks

My task: the dehumanization of Nature, and then the naturalization of humanity, after it has attained the pure concept of 'Nature'. Human beings and philosophers have in the past projected the human into nature - let us dehumanize nature. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In the face of such terror and dehumanization, human passion itself was an act of defiance. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

Dehumanization isn't a way of talking. It's a way of thinking - a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable. ~ David Livingstone Smith

Should we in America refuse to alter our lifestyle, I believe we will experience increasing dehumanization - of ourselves- both individually and corporately. To begin to share on a broad scale, therefore, is not just a matter of obedience to God or of altruism but rather a necessary requirement for remaining human. ~ Richard Baer

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. ~ Audre Lorde

Until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved - especially the ones that we've helped to eliminate - I'm not sure we'll really be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization. ~ Judith Butler

traumatic diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder describe a shared array of human responses to degradation and dehumanization (Good & Hinton, 2016; Ross, 2011) ~ Michael Salter

If consummers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact in our lives. ~ Bell Hooks

In all my time as an activist, I've never seen a single instance where the people instigating abuse, even in the worst possible cases, thought they were the 'bad guys'. There is always a righteous undertone.

Dehumanization works its mental magic, and turning the target into a 'villain' provides the attacker with the chance to be a 'hero'. You can rationalize doing all kinds of things to a symbol that you would never do to a human. The campaign becomes a false battle between good and evil, and tormenting someone is seen as a struggle over something much larger than either of you. That's the key ingredient in the magic trick that, in the abusers' minds, turns screaming at a game developer's father through a telephone into defending an entire artistic medium from censorship. ~ Zoe Quinn

Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. ~ Saul Bellow

I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair. ~ Bell Hooks

In any kind of conflict, you have a certain dehumanization that comes along with it. And it's important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity. ~ Anthony Shadid

In the interests of separation, Black women have been taught to view each other as always suspect, heartless competitors for the scarce male, the all-important prize that could legitimize our existence. This dehumanizing denial of self is no less lethal than the dehumanization of racism to which it is so closely allied. ~ Audre Lorde

The idea that any art is achieved 'intuitively' is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. It is those supposed incapable of intelligence, training, or connection with a tradition who are described as working by instinct or intuition. ~ Joanna Russ

I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives. A disastrous by-product of the development of the scientific and technical mentality. We are guilty. Man grows cold faster than the planet he inhabits. ~ Albert Einstein

In somber mood, I re-called my whole life up to this day, and my head spun with the buzzing of a hundred and one ouroboristic worms. I remembered the drinking parties that made us thirsty and the thirst that made us drink; I thought back to Sidonius recounting his endless dream; to the people who worked to be able to eat and who ate to have the strength to work; to the black thoughts I drowned with such sadness in the cask and which were reborn in different hues. Between the vicious circles of the drinking party and those of the delusory paradises, I would never again be able to choose, I could no longer be part of their revolutions, I was from that moment no more than a wasteland. ~ Rene Daumal

It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory. ~ Seraphim Rose

And then again, there was something painfully familiar in the menace and male jocularity of that tape. I can hurt you and get away with it. ... Every woman I know recognized it. Every person who's ever been made to feel 'other' recognized it. ... Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It's the ugliest kind of power. ~ Michelle Obama

We need to undergo a very radical revolution in values. And we need to think about what it's like to have become so materialistic that we think having a good job, and consuming like crazy to compensate for the dehumanization of the job, is living like a human being. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age. ~ Thomas Szasz

Early Muslim references to dehumanization were overtly ethnocentric. Almost without exception, the people who are transformed into subhuman creatures - specifically, pigs, apes, and rats - are Jews. ~ David Livingstone Smith

Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren't lying around waiting to be discovered. They're made, not found. ~ David Livingstone Smith

For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. ~ Audre Lorde

Monotheism by whatever name has been the rationale for war and genocide forever. And the Unchosen, the inferior Others, are always demonized as an excuse to oppress them. ~ Peter Matthiessen

On the Bigotry of Culture:
: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Soldier on guard says they've identified "someone on two legs a hundred metres from the outpost". The other soldier, in the lookout, says "A girl about ten," but by then they're already shooting. Girl's dead[ ... ]The point is this use of code, on two legs, denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts walking on two legs [ ... ]The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking it to "if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?" [ ... ] my thesis being that the occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us. ~ Selma Dabbagh

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. ~ Eric Hoffer

Perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanization, the killing of the soul ~ Anthony Burgess

How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? ~ Paulo Freire

Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed ~ Paulo Freire

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

Nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening. ~ Sarah Schulman

He felt like the world didn't want him, like he was born hated, and he was. He was smart, he was funny, he'd never done a bad deed in his life, born innocent just like all the rest of us… but he was black in a white world, and I think somewhere along the way, he stopped feeling like a human being. ~ Rebecca McNutt

The more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will to understand each other. If we can't see ourselves in another person at all - if his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own - we often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good. ~ Kathryn Schulz

Turning the pages of crime novels it occurs to me to ask how it's possible to write so much without saying the word "pain," "life," or "anxiety." I reject this stupid dehumanization. The behaving without motive. The horrific shutting out of what is most vital or important. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

You sucked it up in your mother's milk, that hate. ~ Peter Matthiessen

People who put principles before people are people who hate people. They don't much care about how well it works, just about how right it is ... they may even like it better if it inflicts enough pain. ~ John Barnes

[Christian rebellion] arises from the doctrine of mankind made in the image of God, and therefore protests against all forms of dehumanization. It sets itself against the social injustices which insult God the Creator, seeks to protect human beings from oppression and longs to liberate them ... it protests against every authoritarian regime, whether of the left or of the right, which discriminates against minorities, denies people their civil rights, forbids the free expression of opinions or imprisons people for their views alone. ~ John R.W. Stott

I would much rather be the obnoxious feminist girl than be complicit in my own dehumanization. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Unlike these verses from the Koran, references to dehumanization in the hadith compiled two or three centuries later have a distinctly anti-Jewish flavor. They describe how a group of Israelites were transformed into rats, how unbelievers are turned into monkeys and pigs, and how Abraham's father was transformed into an animal and hurled into the raging fires of hell. ~ David Livingstone Smith

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his. ~ James A. Baldwin

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder. ~ Peter Watts

We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe. ~ Vandana Shiva

Sarah DiMuccio, an American researcher and PhD student at New York University, published a paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinity that offered a simple, cultural definition of that type of manhood that stuck with me. Comparing the Danish idea of masculinity with the American one, she found that the major difference between them was that in Denmark, men said to 'be a man' meant not being a boy.

American men said that to 'be a man' was to not be a woman.

That is, Niobe Way says, where all the trouble starts. If being 'feminine' is the opposite of being a man, then many qualities that Americans associate with women (such as empathy, which shows up in boys as well as girls) are not just frowned upon, but destroyed in boyhood. 'You're only a man by not being a woman,' Way told me. 'That's basing someone's humanness on someone else's dehumanization. ~ Thomas Page McBee

This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization -- the people's historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of dehumanization. Not that it
is not fundamental to have in order to be human. Precisely because it is necessary, some men's having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others' having, must not consolidate the power of the former to
crush the latter. ~ Paulo Friere

Our recent history should have made one thing clear. Women's rights are human rights. Any foreign policy that fails to recognize this effectively dehumanizes half the human race. ~ Jack Holland

Many women all over the world are confused about their real identity and do not seem to know if being a woman is of any value to society ~ Topsy Gift

Michael Pollan: "The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do."
U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I didn't want this man touching me in those places. It wasn't that he was being inappropriate, it was just more that he obviously didn't view me as a person, let alone a scared person with actual feelings. He just saw me as yet another scientific specimen there for his own experimenting. I squeezed my eyes shut, cringing the entire time. ~ Jessica Verdi