Mistreatment Quotes

She was all-out, delighted enthusiasm, like a stupid, bubbling stream, and the guy would just cup that in his hands for the hell of it, splash his face with it, and drop the leftovers back into the river. ~ Laura Florand

Judge Carter sat in stony silence, completely unmoved. At the end of the trial, he pronounced King guilty of conspiracy to violate the 1921 law and ordered him to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine or serve a year at hard labor. Like Judge Carter, the national newspaper and magazine reporters waiting outside for the ruling ignored the black women's testimonies that detailed decades of mistreatment and denied King's leadership in the boycott. Instead, the media turned King into an apostle of civil rights. ~ Danielle L. McGuire

Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Convention. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us - every single one of us - knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them. ~ John McCain

What do you want exactly? (Fang)
An end to the mistreatment of small, fluffy dust bunnies. (Thorn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I am not going to stress the usual argument that the police habitually mistreat Negroes. Every Negro knows this. There is scarcely any black man, woman, or child in the land who at some point or other has not been mistreated by a policeman. (A young man in Watts said, "The riots will continue because I, as a Negro, am immediately considered to be a criminal by the police and, if I have a pretty woman with me, she is a tramp even if she is my wife or mother.") ~ Bayard Rustin

When I turned toward the hurt in the silence, I entered a kind of tenderness that was not sore, not wounded, but rather powerfully present.I sat up straight. The silence had tilled hard ground into soft soil. I sunk deep into the soft ground, where the source of life was revealed--wordless, nameless, without form, completely indescribable. And then--I dare to say it--I was 'completely tender.' To ease below the surface of my embodiment--my face, my flesh, my skin, my name--I needed to first see it reflected back at me. I had to look at it long enough to see the soft patches, the openings, the soft, tender ground. Would I survive the namelessness--without my body, without my heart--while engaging the beautiful, floral exterior of my life? Fear and caution were attempting to shut down the experience of uncoupling my heart from mistreatment and discrimination--from the disregard, hurt, and separation that I experienced and accepted as my one-sided life. I was going back to the moment before I was born, when I was connected to something other than my parents or my people. ~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Humans are an absolute miracle of design. We come in all these fun shapes and sizes and we can survive all sorts of hardship and mistreatment and be practically as good as new the next day - try pouring a bottle of bourbon down your toaster and see just how well it works the next day - but the design's not perfect. Nothing is. And just because you love somebody won't make them love you back. ~ Paul Schmidtberger

I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us. ~ Chinua Achebe

God thundered again and again through the prophets that worship in the context of mistreatment of the poor and disadvantaged is an outrage. ~ Ronald J. Sider

"You laid it on a little thick out there."
Morpheus clucks his tongue. "I performed masterfully," he answers, at last managing to claim his hat from Chessie.
"Right," Jeb scoffs. "Pretty sure my mistreatment wouldn't have sent you into hysterics, drama queen."
Morpheus smirks. "Fair enough. On the other hand, your portrayal of a brainless wind-up numbskull was spot on."
Jeb's lips quiver, as if he's fighting a smile himself. "You know, I still have enough paint to make that flyswatter."
"Tut. No need for violence." Morpheus taps the dust from his hat and places it on his head. "I'm simply giving credit where it's due." ~ A.G. Howard

If we have been silent and have chosen to ignore the mistreatment of others in the past, we should begin to speak up and challenge injustices. If we were racist and bigoted in our speech and actions, there should be a radical change that is observable. If we have been angry and spiteful toward the other, there should be a radical change that is observable. And, yes, if we have an abundance of wealth and we have the opportunity to use this blessing to encourage those we have previously been prejudiced against, we should open our hands in Christian love and brotherhood. We should tear down the walls that have separated us for so long. ~ John M. Perkins

Madness in Civilization is a brilliant, provocative, and hugely entertaining history of the treatment and mistreatment of the mentally ill. Packed with bizarre details and disturbing facts, Andrew Scull's book offers fresh and compelling insights on the way medicine's inability to solve the mystery of madness has both haunted and shaped two thousand years of culture. Required reading for anyone who has ever gone to a shrink! ~ Dirk Wittenborn

The central attitudes driving the Victim are:
Everybody has done me wrong, especially the women I've been involved with. Poor me.
When you accuse me of being abusive, you are joining the parade of people who have been cruel and unfair to me. It proves you're just like the rest.
It's justifiable for me to do to you whatever I feel you are doing to me, and even to make it quite a bit worse to make sure you get the message.
Women who complain of mistreatment by men, such as relationship abuse or sexual harassment, are anti-male and out for blood.
I've had it so hard that I'm not responsible for my actions. ~ Lundy Bancroft

PETA is such an important cause to me. The mistreatment of animals is something that just really gets me. I feel it's really the most important part of what I do. Don't Eat Meat! Don't Wear Fur! I mean, there are so many other options these days. ~ Pamela Anderson

The conventional public opposition of 'liberal' and 'conservative' is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The 'conservatives' promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the mainstays of family life. Under the sponsorship of 'conservative' presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home - a development that was bad enough - now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of 'liberals,' who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as 'liberated' - though nobody has yet seen the fathers thus forced away as 'liberated.' Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated. ~ Wendell Berry

I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy," direct. ~ William S. Burroughs

In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed. ~ Azar Nafisi

Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals-and ourselves in the process. ~ Michael Fox

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. ~ Phil Robertson

The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the women's long struggle in the dimly lit background, obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Park's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it was black women's decade-long struggle against mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381 days. ~ Danielle L. McGuire

One of the techniques terrorists employ is to allege torture and mistreatment when they are captured, regardless of whether it is true. ~ Linda Chavez

The central attitudes driving Mr. Right are:
You should be in awe of my intelligence and should look up to me intellectually. I know better than you do, even about what's good for you.
Your opinions aren't worth listening to carefully or taking seriously.
The fact that you sometimes disagree with me shows how sloppy your thinking is.
If you would just accept that I know what's right, our relationship would go much better. Your own life would go better, too.
When you disagree with me about something, no matter how respectfully or meekly, that's mistreatment of me.
If I put you down for long enough, some day you'll see. ~ Lundy Bancroft

Parents who spoil their children out of 'love' should realize that they are performing acts of child abuse. Although there are no laws against such abuse
no man-made laws anyway
this spiritual mistreatment may result in as much long-term personal and social damage as the worst physical abuse. ~ Randy Alcorn

And you have detainees who typically were captured and turned over to U.S. forces without any proper judicial process. After that, they experienced heavy mistreatment and found themselves incarcerated in another hemisphere, in GTMO Bay, by a country that claims to safeguard human rights all over the world - but a country that many Muslims suspect is conspiring with other evil forces to wipe the Islamic religion off the face of the earth. ~ Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it. ~ Rosa Parks

Everyone looks for someone to love them, even when they hate themselves. They wait for lightning to strike, for the phone to ring, for a knight to arrive in shining armor. When people are disappointed in love, they think they're unlovable. They feel deprived and always hungry. This hunger makes them desperate for any offer of love and attention, and susceptible to all forms of mistreatment. To encourage ~ Miguel Ruiz

Remember every mistreatment experience shows up to give you the opportunity to learn love at a deeper level. You don't need to defend yourself because you cannot be diminished. You must understand that defensiveness doesn't protect you. It actually makes you feel more vulnerable and unsafe. In protecting yourself you are embracing the idea that you can be hurt and this will only create more fear in your life. If you embrace fear and judgment you are choosing to live in fear and judgment.
If you choose to let go of the need to protect and defend yourself and put down your defenses because you understand you cannot be hurt - you will actually feel safer. When you choose to feel bulletproof, infinite and absolute all the time, no defense is ever necessary. ~ Kimberly Giles

Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop, ... Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy ... And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas because inevitably these abuses become public. ~ John McCain

There is a condition into which many young women fall. They attach themselves to violent men. They forgive any mistreatment. They think it love; it isn't. What they really want is to be punished for their sins, real and imagined - or for someone else's ~ Jed Rubenfeld

When rehabilitation works, there is no question that it is the best and most productive use of the correctional system. It stands to reason: if we can take a bad guy and turn him into a good guy and then let him out, then that's one fewer bad guy to harm us. . . .

Where I do not think there is much hope. . .is when we deal with serial killers and sexual predators, the people I have spent most of my career hunting and studying. These people do what they do. . .because it feels good, because they want to, because it gives
them satisfaction. You can certainly make the argument, and I will agree with you, that many of them are compensating for bad jobs, poor self-image, mistreatment by parents, any number of things. But that doesn't mean we're going to be able to rehabilitate them. ~ John E. Douglas

Once upon a time there was a garden, surrounded on all sides by a great, high fence. In that garden, an old demon ruled over thousands upon thousands of slaves. But the surprising thing was that the only sound ever to be heard within those high walls was the sound of merry laughter. Hahaha and hohoho, all year round-because of the laughing magic which the old demon had used on his slaves. "Why did he use such magic on them? To conceal his evil mistreatment of them, of course, and also to create a deception, saying, 'This is how happy the people in our garden are.' And that's also why he put the fences up, so that the people in other gardens couldn't see over or come in. So, well, think about it. Where in the world might you find such a garden, such a den of evil magic, where cries of pain and sadness were wrenched from the mouths of its people and distorted into laughter? ~ Bandi

Dumbledore paused, and although his voice remained light and calm, and he gave no obvious sign of anger, Harry felt a kind of chill emanating from him and noticed that the Dursleys drew very slightly closer together.
You did not do as I asked. You have never treated Harry as a son. He has known nothing but neglect and often cruelty at your hands. The best that can be said is that he has at least escaped the appalling damage you have inflicted upon the unfortunate boy sitting between you. ~ J.K. Rowling

The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful differences of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration? ~ Albert Schweitzer

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called "The Aetiology of Hysteria." However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the "Oedipus complex," which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women's and children's reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the st ~ Lundy Bancroft

If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place. Abusers interpret silence as approval, or at least as forgiveness. To abused women, meanwhile, the silence means that no one will help - just what her partner wants her to believe. Anyone who chooses to quietly look the other way therefore unwittingly becomes the abuser's ally. ~ Lundy Bancroft

But none of that is possible," he continued, "if my heart is at war. A heart at war needs enemies to justify its warring. It needs enemies and mistreatment more than it wants peace. ~ The Arbinger Institute

Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems. ~ Lundy Bancroft

Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

What makes a woman vulnerable to mistreatment at home, no matter how well she functions outside, is the belief that her need for her partner's love is the most important thing in her life. The prizes of success, financial gain, status, and prestige pale in comparison to that need. In addition, our true natures and weaknesses generally become obvious only in our intimate relationships. The faces we put on for the outside world may have little to do with how we feel about ourselves, how we expect to be treated, and what we will accept from our partners. ~ Susan Forward

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination. ~ Tim Wise

In the wake of newly-alleged prisoner abuse this week, Senator John McCain said that continued mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is hurting the nation's image. Also hurting the nation's image: letting people drown when it rains. ~ Amy Poehler

For me, the Revolution sought to end mistreatment, not to democratize it. ~ Gioconda Belli

Cruelty is seldom forgotten. You feel it as a child. Somebody takes away your toy or thoughtlessly kicks over your sand castle. A beautiful boy walks into your life, sees something he doesn't like or doesn't understand, and painstakingly endeavours to make you feel how much he hates you, to be constantly aware of the flaws that provoke that hatred. And then you grow older and wiser, but you don't forget the cruelty. You can't forget it, because there is nothing stronger, nothing more palpable in the human brain than the memory of mistreatment. ~ L. H. Cosway

The misfortune we sometimes view as punishment is really just the natural result of our poor judgment; but it is easier for us to claim mistreatment than to admit to poor judgment. ~ Debbie Gilliland

In reality, to remain neutral is to collude with the abusive man, whether or not that is your goal. If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place. ~ Lundy Bancroft

Woe to the man who offends a small child! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky