Victimhood Quotes

People can become so blinded by their own perceived victimhood that they make victims of everyone around them. ~ Richard Paul Evans

I recall vividly the night before one of my own early surgeries, an eight-hour affair that would alter my body permanently. I was twenty-seven and unmarried at the time. Late in the evening a pleasant elderly woman, a technical aide, had come to my hospital room to shave my abdomen in preparation for the procedure. As she went about this humble task with great skill, she had asked me about the next day's surgery. Filled with resentment, self-pity, and a sense of victimhood, I told her what was planned and burst into tears. She had seemed quite surprised. "How would YOU feel if they were going to do this to YOU tomorrow?" I asked her angrily. she had taken my question literally and had thought it over. Then, patting me gently, she had said, "If I needed it to live, I would be glad for the help." Her answer had changed everything. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Resentments and grudges are two of the main culprits that perpetuate cycles of self-abuse and victimhood. Stowed away inside you like parasites, they deplete you of your God-given life force and separate you from your inherent worth, your joy, and the love in your heart. ~ Debbie Ford

Victims becoming torturers is such a classic historical pattern that we could formulate, regarding any revolution whatever, this iron law : combat oppression; beware of the oppressed. ~ Pascal Bruckner

In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. ~ Timothy Snyder

Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget. ~ Steven Pinker

As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought. ~ Tammy Bruce

There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one's fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call 'the Affirmative No.' The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim.... Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none. ~ Jeanne Safer

Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims. ~ Julian Assange

Direct questions are the worst. Cops must know this--when someone asks you a question, it is really, really hard not to answer it. It's even harder when people dig up old tweets and put them side by side with new ones and you can't really explain the discrepancy. And then other people see the discrepancy and they start liking and retweeting and rephrasing. And they also see your silence, and your silence looks like an answer. It's an extremely effective interrogation tactic, and most people make either a tearful apology or an enraged counterattack.
This is why Twitter callouts tend to end so badly. Apology is never enough (and probably shouldn't be), so you're basically being asked to willingly give up power for no clear end. The best people actually do that. But the real shitfucks go on the offense, and then their communities get an infusion of victimhood narratives straight into their veins. ~ Hank Green

Because modern society has almost completely eliminated trauma and violence from everyday life, anyone who does suffer those things is deemed to be extraordinarily unfortunate. This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery. ~ Sebastian Junger

She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those details, were her weaponry of choice against the many difficulties that she had to face. New York was a bitter place for women of her class and color in those days, but she did not reciprocate that bitterness. She rose above the meanness that surrounded her. She punched holes in that meanness with her cleverness and wit and with her eye for the preposterous. She laughed a lot. She loved her lamb chops and her baked potato. In the details, she transcended. ~ Jonathan Kozol

The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right's unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American's drive for a 'race-neutral' one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is 'reverse discrimination. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

How do you come after me, when it is all of us? One of the greatest dangers of victimhood is the singling out; all of your attributes and anecdotes assigned blame. In court they'll try to make you believe you are unlike the others, you are different, an exception. You are dirtier, more stupid, more promiscuous. But it's a trick. The assault is never personal, the blaming is. ~ Chanel Miller

The rest of us have never embraced your victim mentality; we are not victims. We are people, the same way that men are. We are equal, yet different. We, unlike you, realize that is not mutually exclusive. ~ Lori Ziganto

You can't stand in gratitude if you're stuck in victimhood. ~ Robin Sharma

As we watched the Neo-Nazis march through Charlottesville chanting 'The
Jews will not replace us' on their way to defend a statue of a man that fought a
war to keep slavery, we are confronted by the lunatic contradictions of white-
supremacist identity. While claiming to be supreme, these people clearly do not
believe what they are selling, for if Aryans are inherently superior there would
be no need at all to worry about Jews or niggers 'replacing' them. Surely an
innate Aryan supremacy should make them by definition irreplaceable? This
constant articulation of supremacy and victimhood has long been a cornerstone
of white-supremacist discourse. ~ Akala

What you went through is horrible. I'm not disputing it.'

'Okay. So?'

'Just that this man whom you depicted - it was like he was a monster. The sum total of all the evil things in the world.'

'No, I never said that.'

'But that's how it came across.'

'That's not what I intended. It was his violence. That's all.'

Here's a friend asking me if there was nothing redeemable about my ex-husband. I do not know how to justify myself. What do I tell people like him, who want a balanced picture, who want to know that this was a real person with a rainbow side, just so that they are reminded of their own humanity?

I realize that this is the curse of victimhood, to feel compelled to lend an appropriate colour of goodness to their abuser. ~ Meena Kandasamy

I wear makeup and I don dramatic attire because I like control. I'm not interested in controlling others but I'm invested in strict self-governance. This is why I don't do many face-to-face interviews. I don't like being caught off-guard. It all goes back to that attempt to create order amidst disorder. One of the most frightening things about losing your mind is that you feel like your body, your brain, every part of your essence is being invaded. There is such a palpable helplessness to that narrative and I hate the sense of victimhood that it implies. Certainly, this is how I felt during my moments of psychological disquiet. I felt like my personhood was under attack. Performativity is important to me because I'm the teller of my own stories. I have been performing these multiple roles for so long that they have bled into my identity. I have become the man that I always wanted to be. ~ Diriye Osman

I believe that the fragile-flower, idea-intolerant society of victimhood that is being cultivated in many colleges today is really bad. ~ Gene Weingarten

Before 9/11, I thought that tragedy had the potential to connect us with humanity in ways that prosperity does not. I thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect. Now I realize that this is not always the case. One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one's own condition, a seeking proof of one's special place in the world, even in victimhood. One afternoon, I shared these thoughts with a new colleague, the Israeli vice chancellor of the Budapest-based Central European University. When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, "Never again." In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to my people; the other that it should never again happen to any people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake. ~ Mahmood Mamdani

She was a victim, until she decided she wasn't. Until she realized only she had the final say in her victimhood. That it was a choice. Her choice. Before then, she allowed the actions of others to define her. She allowed painful, unfair circumstances to dictate how she announced herself to the world. She gave up control of who she was, and who she wanted to be, at home - but lost - in a victim's life. so she made the choice to find herself. She couldn't take responsibility for everything that happened to her. Bad things happen to us all, even when we don't invite them. But, she could own her response to all of it. everything. The moment she chose to do so, she ignited a strength she'd long forgotten and saw, at last, new possibilitiess for her life. She opened the door to a deeper healing and to endless opportunities for real change. The very moment she chose to take responsibility for her life, she acknowledged her power like never before. And was, never again, a victim. ~ Scott Stabile

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. ~ Heather MacDonald

When I talk of forgiveness I mean the belief that you can come out the other side a better person. A better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood, making you almost dependent on the perpetrator. If you can find it in yourself to forgive then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on, and you can even help the perpetrator to become a better person too ~ Desmond Tutu

Unbeknownst to me, it had become my mission to prove that the world isn't the horrible place we often make it out to be. That just because there are some dirty fish, it doesn't mean the entire ocean is dirty and we need to confine ourselves to the shores we know. The fear bred by the news compels people to stay at home - trapped in a shrinking comfort zone - like it had once compelled me. I had much to unlearn for the sake of the freedom I chased, the victimhood I despised and my mission to build unlikely friendships. ~ Shivya Nath

Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape.
The shaming is in being asked to stand judgment. ~ Meena Kandasamy

Victimhood and a 'can't do' spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression. ~ Cal Thomas

No one is ever a victim, although your conquerors would have you believe in your own victimhood. How else could theu conquer you? ~ Barbara Marciniak

Perhaps, if we lived properly, we would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, resentment, then envy, and then the desire for vengeance and destruction. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we wouldn't have to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own insufficiency and ignorance. Perhaps we could come to avoid those pathways to Hell - and we have seen in the terrible twentieth century just how real Hell can be. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination. ~ Bell Hooks

Today's feminism infantilizes women. If feminism is not about freedom, then what the heck is it for? It just becomes a grievance lobby of victimhood games. ~ Janet Albrechtsen

The Joy of Victimhood There are some clear rules about happiness. One is that you cannot be happy if your primary identity is that of a victim, even if you really are one. There are a number of reasons: People who regard themselves as victims do not see themselves as in control of their lives. Whatever happens in their lives happens to them, not by them. People who primarily regard themselves as victims see the world as unfair to them in particular. Just as the young student who always sees himself as "being picked on" is an unhappy soul, so is the person who carries that attitude into adulthood. People who regard themselves primarily as victims are angry people, and an angry disposition renders happiness impossible. People who have chosen to regard themselves as victims cannot allow themselves to enjoy life, because enjoying life would challenge their perception of themselves as victims. ~ Dennis Prager

If you are taught bitterness and anger, then you will believe you are a victim. You will feel aggrieved and the twin brother of aggrievment is entitlement. So now you think you are owed something and you don't have to work for it and now you're on a really bad road to nowhere because there are people who will play to that sense of victimhood, aggreivement and entitlement, and you still won't have a job. ~ Condoleezza Rice

One nurse thought I was "brave." I think she was talking about my steely-eyed, grin-and-bear-it kind of attitude. There were no tears, no complaints from me - a total lack of affect. In a victim, it is courage and thus admirable; in a predator, it is a lack of humanity and instills fear. ~ M.E. Thomas

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. ~ Timothy Snyder

...(S)uffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from outside. It's the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital.

In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim's mind -- a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim's mind. ~ Edith Eger

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic. ~ Christopher Hitchens

National politics and elections are dominated by emotions, by lack of self-confidence, by fear of the other, by insecurity, by infection of the body politic by the virus of victimhood. ~ Tariq Ramadan

At Home in the World is the story of a young woman, raised in some difficult circumstances, and how she survives. It tells a story of redemption, not victimhood. ~ Joyce Maynard

A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions. ~ Serge Schmemann

I didn't wake up this morning worrying about what protest color I'd wear, or what the world would do without me because I didn't wake up feeling like the victimhood narrative was a part of my story. Real women don't have to remind the world every day that history once slighted them. ~ Tomi Lahren

If I know something, I am not a victim. Victims don't know the meaning of their suffering. I am an enemy or a collaborator, not a victim. ~ Rachel Klein

Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil. ~ Jonathan Haidt

I'm not leaving the plane that way," I said to myself. That's when I discovered the power of choice - a third place that is neither "have to" or "want to." That discovery freed me to move forward to make two other choices: I'm not going to be kicked out of this plane; and If I'm going to leave this plane, it will be under my own power. I'm going to maximize my chances of a safe exit. The change in my feelings at that moment was quite dramatic. Stress was replaced with purposeful action; a sense of victimhood was transformed into empowerment. There was no hesitation, no ambivalence. ~ Neil A. Fiore

Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that "While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages." Liberals - even upper-income liberals - are a third less likely to say this. ~ Arthur C. Brooks

The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concerns with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous. Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard if illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation. ~ Timothy Snyder

Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage before outright aggression. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Victimhood gives us great moral superiority and entitles us to unquestioning sympathy while exempting us from examining any single one of our actions. A victim is utterly devoid of responsibility or blame. This of course leaves us vulnerable as we will carry on engaging in precisely the behaviour which provoked an unacceptable response. ~ Belinda Brown

Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute. ~ Stephen A. Diamond

As Pope Benedict XVI said in his address to the United Nations in April 2008, the language of rights is borrowed from the great Christian tradition, but if you cut off those Christian roots, you get all kinds of abuses, each claiming the postmodern high ground of victimhood but only succeeding in debasing the coinage of rights itself. ~ N. T. Wright

To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself.

In myths, nothing good comes from gloating. You have to let the gods maintain the image of their singular power.

I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless.

It is a reflex to expect the bad with the good.

I don't know what fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. I don't know that my habits of pretending are only making us worse.

Maybe moving forward also meant circling back.

There are always two worlds. The one that I choose and the one that I deny, which inserts itself without my permission.

To change our behavior, we must change our feelings and to change our feelings, we must change our thoughts.

Freedom is bout choice - about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity and self-expression.

To be free is to live in the present.

When you have something to prove, you are not free.

When we grieve, it's not just over what happened - we grieve for what didn't happen.

You can't heal what you can't feel.

It's easier to hold someone or something else responsible for your pain than to take responsibility for ending your own victimhood.

Our painful experiences aren't a liability, they are a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, a ~ Edith Eva Eger

Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement's desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt 'us and them' mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people. ~ Alison Phipps

Women's liberation fought for the right of women to leave the home and become involved in the public sphere; feminists now want to convert this realm into a series of safe spaces and censored zones. If you don't like what someone says to you on the street, say something back, put your headphones on, or just laugh – it's really not that bad. ~ Ella Whelan

What is the return on investment of being wedded to your suffering? What do you receive from stewing in victim consciousness? Righteous indignation or an excuse not to change? ~ Lisa Cypers Kamen

Feminists believe that women should be protected from certain aspects of public life, including speech..... Feminists do not want to engage in aspects of life they disagree with. Instead, they want to silence what they don't like through censorship and criminalisation. Feminists believe that women need protection from words.
Finally, contemporary feminists do not believe that women are independent, free-thinking individuals. Feminists promote a cliquey, sisterhood mentality, but not through a collective and positive sharing of ideas. They're the kind of group you'd encounter at school who would shun you if you weren't wearing the right kind of hairband. Today's feminism is opposed to criticism and nuance, refusing to allow women to form their own opinions or challenge preconceived ideas. ~ Ella Whelan

Every time a dog humps your leg, you're being raped. #metoo ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

My Dear Son,
I am so very proud of you. Now, as you embark on a new journey, I'd like to share this one piece of advice. Always, always remember that - adversity is not a detour. It is part of the path.

You will encounter obstacles. You will make mistakes. Be grateful for both. Your obstacles and mistakes will be your greatest teachers. And the only way to not make mistakes in this life is to do nothing, which is the biggest mistake of all.

Your challenges, if you let them, will become your greatest allies. Mountains can crush or raise you, depending on which side of the mountain you choose to stand on. All history bears out that the great, those who have changed the world, have all suffered great challenges. And, more times than not it's precisely those challenges that, in God's time, lead to triumph.

Abhor victimhood. Denounce entitlement. Neither are gifts, rather cages to damn the soul. Everyone who has walked this earth is a victim of injustice. Everyone.

Most of all, do not be too quick to denounce your sufferings. The difficult road you are called to walk may, in fact be your only path to success. ~ Richard Paul Evans

There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass. ~ Paul Rusesabagina

They both possessed a victimhood that had been conferred because they'd both been guilty of being female in a world where some men believed they deserved never to feel powerless. ~ Val McDermid

Americans who do not see themselves as victims - of an 'unfair' or 'racist' or 'misogynist' society - are more likely to vote Republican. On the other hand, Americans who see themselves as victims of American society are likely to vote Democrat. Therefore, the Democratic Party and its supportive media cultivate victimhood among almost all Americans who are not white and male. ~ Dennis Prager

In the psychotherapeutic worldview to which all good liberals subscribe, there is no evil, only victimhood. The robber and the robbed, the murderer and the murdered, are alike the victims of circumstance, united by the events that overtook them. Future generations (I hope) will find it curious how, in the century of Stalin and Hitler, we have been so eager to deny man's capacity for evil. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

As a child, the best way to survive was to be still, to submit - to do nothing that might incur further harm. That belief had grown with me through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, an unacknowledged mentor directing my every path, reinforcing a ubiquitous sense of powerlessness and victimhood. I had believed that I was bad, and unloveable, and cowardly, and weak - beliefs that had been unconscious, and had always gone unchallenged. I believed them because they were true, and they were true because I believed them. ~ Carolyn Spring

I will not be a victim. I will not think like a victim. I am going to avenge all those little girls. I am going to win. ~ Carolyn Lee Adams

When your victimhood is your empowerment, recovery is the enemy, and working on 'individual change' becomes counterproductive, even dangerous to your identity. ~ Tammy Bruce

Lies and victimhood make evil possible ~ Dennis Prager

The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint. ~ George Will

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. ~ Robert O. Paxton

When you inhabit any of these three roles, you're reacting to fear of victimhood, loss of control, or loss of purpose. You're always looking outside yourself, to the people and circumstances of life, for a sense of safety, security, and sanity. ~ David Emerald Womeldorff

I can either be a victim - or a winner. Fuck victimhood. I don't wear it well; it clashes with my wardrobe. I'm ready. Only one of us is getting out alive. It's going to be me. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Nothing enables people to do evil as much as does a sense of victimhood ~ Dennis Prager

Having problems doesn't make you noble or virtuous, it makes you human. Nobility and virtue comes from the way that you handle your problems and either learn to move past them or live with them if out of your control. ~ Oli Anderson

But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity. ~ Dean Koontz

People having victimhood attract imperious and authoritative individuals in their life ~ Sunday Adelaja

All victimhood is ego and is not spiritually inspired ~ Frank Healy

Writing journal is for those people who find no interest in living a life of victimhood and limited personal freedom. ~ Deepak Burfiwala

Stop bitching about everybody else and what they've done to you and start cleaning up your own shit yourself.

The only person who can make you a victim is you. ~ Max Patrick

I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties
feminism and multi-culturalism
come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence. ~ Theodore Dalrymple