Victims Of Circumstance Quotes

We may think of volcanic islands like Ascension as unusual because their recent origin and remoteness mean their ecosystems are made up of a motley crew of mariner migrants. But much of the world is like that. Nature is constantly in flux, and few ecosystems go back very far. Only ten thousand years ago, much of Europe and North America were covered in thick ice. All soil had been scraped away and with it most forms of life. Everything we see today in these former glaciated zones has either returned or arrived for the first time since the ice retreated.
Looked at from this perspective, the spread of alien species today is merely a continuation of a natural process of the colonization begun when the ice retreated. A broad time horizon shows there is no such thing as a native species. All lodgings are temporary and all ecosystems in a constant flux, the victims of circumstance and geological accident. As the pioneer British ecologist Charles Elton argued, "Were it not for the ice age, we [in Britain] should probably have wonderful mixed forests with wild magnolias and laurels and epiphytic orchids, such as . . . in China. ~ Fred Pearce

We do not have to be victims of circumstance. ~ Kweisi Mfume

Successful people decide how they are going to live; they are not victims of circumstance. In good times or bad times, they know where they are going and they know that they are going to get there. ~ Bob Proctor

So here's the flash: Continuing to live life as a victim of circumstance, forever focusing on what's wrong with everything and everybody, will never, ever, bring the life desired. It will only bring one thing: more of whatever it is we're wanting so desperately to change. ~ Lynn Grabhorn

We can spend our days bemoaning our losses, or we can grow from them. Ultimately the choice is ours. We can be victims of circumstance or masters of our own fate, but make no mistake, we cannot be both.
The Walk - Epilogue Page 288 ~ Richard Paul Evans

We're victims of circumstance. At least I can feel confident that I would've liked him no matter what. If he were any other guy who came into my bar, sat down, and talked to me, I would've wanted him. ~ Penelope Douglas

I got into rapping by being a victim of circumstances; it was a hard situation with my brother. Mainly my older brother got hit with a life sentence, so he kind of inspired me. ~ Trae Tha Truth

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

Take action. Every story you've ever connected with, every leader you've ever admired, every puny little thing that you've ever accomplished is the result of taking action. You have a choice. You can either be a passive victim of circumstance or you can be the active hero of your own life. ~ Bradley Whitford

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

Renunciation, The Natural Daughter demonstrates, is the act of those who believe that their happiness is dependent on a power beyond their control which happens at a particular time, and for reasons which they cannot penetrate, not to permit them fulfilment, and this is the fundamental reason for Goethe's imperviousness to philosophies of history which do not acknowledge either the inscrutability of fate or the contingency of circumstance.

The image of perfect beauty for Goethe is permanently recoverable, provided only that fate and circumstances are favourable, for they are the powers that direct the real world, in which alone fulfilment is worth having.

Renunciation is the silence that acknowledges the absence from reality of the Ideal, and it may be interrupted only by the poem that celebrates the epiphany for which even the hope may not be uttered.

Conversely, poems, being all of them occasional poems, and expressing delight in a glimpse of beauty recovered, thanks to favourable circumstances, are an emblem, or 'talisman', of a 'counter÷magic which works against the hostility of fate.

Bitter though the disappointments of life may be for a noble nature, a poem expresses the miracle of a moment in which the Ideal enters reality once more and the powers that rule the world take on, however fleetingly, the constellation they had in paradise. In the poems he has still to write, Goethe can hope to glimpse again what he has renounce ~ Nicholas Boyle

Renuka's words had caused aversion in Sita that day. Now she could understand Renuka's pain. The day Rama demanded a trial by fire, the day he sent her away into the forest, Sita remembered the sand pot Renuka had made. Ahalya, Renuka, Sita - they were all victims of mistrust and humiliation. ~ Volga

I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities. ~ Marva Collins

America's humanitarian concern for foreign victims of natural disasters or civil strife is being abused by President Bush when he extends legal status to foreigners in the US when there is no reason that they could not go home safely. ~ Dan J. Stein

The morgue is a Victorian update of a system established by Alfred the Great. It's the place where certain deaths are resolved - those where the cause is unclear or is the result of some intended or accidental violence. The bodies are almost always victims in some way - of crime, suicides and car crashes, but also victims of loneliness. It's where you go if you die alone in your flat and your body lies undisturbed for days. It's where you go if no one knew you were dying and no GP attended your final hours. It's where you go if no loved one held your hand as you slipped away. In one way or another, then, all the people who pass through this room are the people who die screaming. ~ Stephen Armstrong

These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because reg­ular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time. ~ Amanda Ripley

In addition, to punishing sexual offenders and protecting our children, we must also provide services, resources and counseling to the people who are victims of these horrible crimes. ~ Jim Costa

To her the world really wasn't just black and white, its shades were in varying shades of gray. Circumstance and experience shaped a person from the moment they were born. Everyone was a complex mix of bad and good. "Is ~ J.M. Dabney

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are still countries that deny women basic civil rights. Worldwide, about 4.4 million women and 1 girls are trapped in the sex trade. In places like Afghanistan and Sudan, girls receive little or no education, wives are treated as the property of their husbands, and women who are raped are routinely cast out of their homes for disgracing their families. Some rape victims are even sent to jail for committing a "moral crime."2 We are centuries ahead of the unacceptable treatment of women in these countries. But knowing that things could be worse should not stop us from trying to make them better. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

It has been known, for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the sight of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of the lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps , can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature. Yet what and enormous portion of anthropology - not to mention the philosophy of man - refuses to take cognizance of this circumstance! But I am no exception here; whether scientist or laymen, we agree finally that our bodies detoriate with age - but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal - even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Our experience of many life circumstances is a function of our personal perspective and not the circumstance itself. ~ Lindsay Wagner

Once I study up on them and the case, I always feel closer to the victims. That closeness drives me to find them or their killers. As if the dead speak to me from within the pages of the case files. ~ J.R. Rain

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc. ~ Thomas Szasz

Bullies, oppressors and all men who do violence to the rights of others are guilty not only of their own crimes, but also of the corruption they bring into the hearts of their victims. ~ Alessandro Manzoni

The works of a person that begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste, and that is annual variety. ~ William Shenstone

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. ~ Aldous Huxley

It started with a dose of mercury bichloride, then a measure of chloroform. Several tumblers of alcohol followed, and then a lead sash weight to the man's head. It finished with picture wire pulled tight around the victim's neck. To such a rare case, the word overkill could be applied without hyperbole. The complicated murder of Albert Snyder put the men of the medical examiner's office - especially Alexander Gettler - on public display. It rapidly became a very public event, the story of the spring for tabloid newspapers and their sensation-loving readers. ~ Anonymous

The pain comes from more than the facts of circumstance, or the deeds of others. It comes from within. From understanding what we lost. It comes from knowing how foolish we were - vain, arrogant children - when we thought ourselves happy. It comes from knowing how fragile and doomed the old ways were, just when we thought them and ourselves, secure!. The pain comes from knowing we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again. ~ John Jakes

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair. ~ Christopher Moore

Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the cast iron-works of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag. ~ Charles Dickens

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. ~ Beryl Markham

If I had ever, in any medium, seen any researcher or popularizer refer even once to any supposedly ay-producing circumstance as the proper hormone balance, or the conducive endocrine environment, for gay generation, I would be less chilled by the breezes of all this technological confidence. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment, if only while beset with fears, step out of line and do "something", however small. And even the smallest, most unheroic of acts adds to the store of kindling that may be ignited by some surprising circumstance into tumultuous change. ~ Howard Zinn

Currently, his clients include the victims of a series of "Houdini-handcuff suicide killings," in which brown boys were handcuffed in the back of the police car and police claim they committed suicide: Victor White in Louisiana, Chavis Carter in Arkansas. Also Alesia Thomas of Los Angeles, a black woman who died after a police officer kicked her seven times in the crotch - there's a video the court will not release for fear of another Rodney King riot. ~ Anonymous

In India, innocent and poor children are victims of child labor. ~ Malala Yousafzai

No human being should ever be patient with prejudice at the expense of its victims" The late Rev. William Sloane Coffin ~ Robert Alper

I'm not saying a hunt isn't something we crave, but to a man, we hate to be manipulated. And this is our town, as much as any human's. Our home, and our neighbours and perhaps even our friends. You fall into the trap of thinking as Fallon does, that there are only heroes and villains, monsters and victims, and nothing between. We all stand in that space, crossing the line to one side, then the other. Even you. ~ Rachel Caine

When the dead betray the living, the victims are memories.
The Book of Brin ~ Michael J. Sullivan

The by far greater number of human beings are never aware of what is passing around and within them, and millions fall victims of disease and die prematurely just on this account. ~ Nikola Tesla

At the first general meeting of this Corporation in 1820, his Lordship presided; a circumstance, which may well be considered an era in the history of the Church of Upper Canada. ~ John Strachan

There's clearly a war against freedom of conscience happening, and the most resistant fighters are the chosen victims, in a deliberate, persistent and consistent dumbing down of the population. ~ Daniel Marques

I wrote mostly about men. I hadn't interviewed a lot of women. Whenever I did, the stories were always about the struggle to be the kind of woman who got interviewed - the writers who were counted out, the politicians who were mistaken for secretaries, the actresses who were told they were too fat and tall and short and skinny and ugly and pretty. It was all the same story, which is not to say it wasn't important. But it was boring. The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.

The men hadn't had any external troubles. They didn't have a fear that they didn't belong. They hadn't had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they'd forgotten. But they were still creative and still people, and so they reached for problems out of an artistic sense of yearning. Their problems weren't real. They had no identity struggle, no illness, no money fears. Instead, they had found the true stuff of their souls - of all our souls - the wound lying beneath all the survivalism and circumstance. pg 233 ~ Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Denial forces victims to retreat in lifeless existence, dieing in the shadows of buried trauma and painful memories. ~ Trudy Metzger