Quotessence
Home / Topics / Dehumanization Quotes

Dehumanization Quotes

Browse 90 quotes about Dehumanization.

Related topics

Humans

Dehumanization Quotes

“So far I’ve been describing a process of getting to know someone as if we live in normal times. I’ve been writing as if we live in a healthy cultural environment, in a society in which people are enmeshed in thick communities and webs of friendship, trust, and belonging. We don’t live in such a society. We live in an environment in which political animosities, technological dehumanization, and social breakdown undermine connection, strain friendships, erase intimacy, and foster distrust. We’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.”

CommunityTrustIsolationConnectionBelongingDistrustAnimosityDehumanizationCrisesSocial Breakdown
Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Create image

“The Song of Naskar (Sonnet 2764) I'm always eager to respond to human curiosity, but I have no time to entertain ape gossip. I don't engage with fanatics, for the same reason I don't consume alcohol, it's a ridiculous waste of brain cells. For those who matter to me, I'll go out of my way to explain myself, if there is misunderstanding, in fact, my brain would remain anxious till we make up. To burn the bridges with dehumanizers is the first requirement of civilization - don't waste your brainpower dignifying bigots, redirect all your neurochemical electricity to power a new world, nonchalant to accusations. Existence is the mightiest revolt against prejudice, irrelevance is the loudest response to inhumanity.”

HonestyPrejudiceCriticsBigotryIntoleranceBraveheartBigotsDehumanizationHaters Gonna HateBurning Bridges
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
Create image

“Increasing policing and government programs an teaching women how to be safe is not going to correct this situation. Only understanding and a commitment to telling the truth about the cruelty inflicted on our women in the name of settling this country would help change peoples’ perceptions, end their complacency, and stop the continued brutalization and dehumanization of our women.”

TruthUnderstandingWomenSafetyComplacencyGovernment ProgramsDehumanizationPerceptions
Book:Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada
Create image

“[I]t is easy to confuse European interest in preserving life to prevent economic loss with positive concern for the captives’ human welfare. But to interpret the regime of the slave ship in that way is to be duped by the slave traders’ rhetoric—a language of concealment that allowed European slaving concerns to portray themselves as passive and powerless before the array of forces (including the agency of the captives themselves) outside their control. Slave merchants and their backers disguised from themselves the ugly truth that the Atlantic regime of commodification took captives from fully realized humanity and suspended them in a purgatory in between tenuous life and dishonorable death.”

EvilSlaveryDeceptionDisguiseDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“Throughout this conversation, it’s important to remember that you’re communicating with a real human being — a person with feelings, stories, history, trauma, heart, and the same needs as you to be heard, understood, and most importantly, respected. Kashdan said that the now-common, overused practice of labeling people as narcissists, gaslighters, and toxic can make us dehumanize other people, especially when their opinions don’t reflect our values. That’s why it’s important to listen to others and understand their point of view. Humans have the ability to change and improve themselves. Minson highlights that when we see that potential in those we disagree with, we’re likely to engage with them more effectively. It’s important to avoid seeing people as “good” or “bad.” This will help you extend some grace and empathy to the other person.”

PeopleHumansUnderstandingGraceListeningConversationEmpathyEngagementConversationsDehumanization
Author:Evelyn Nam
Create image

“While we can all accept that bullying and abuse betray a lack or loss of respect for other human beings, there is a deeper issue: the devaluing of human life; and that in turn indicates a lack or loss of respect for the Giver of human life and dignity, God Himself. The message a bully sends is a mockery of God's handiwork, a lie that slanders God's nature and negates His love for us.”

GodAbuseBullyingDehumanization
Book:The Wounded Spirit
Create image

“If human faith and beliefs taught the universal doctrine that everyone should work for second life with a more purposeful Karma; where human could live with the wisdom to learn every human language, adapt to every culture, believe in every God or deity human had adapted, and be able to perceive the world from everyone else revelation…perhaps, only then, human will stop killing, hating or dehumanizing each other and endeavor to prevail for peaceful endings…..”

FaithHumanityReligiousHumanKarmaDehumanization
Book:Honourable Defection
Create image

“Perhaps it is this attitude, this mental turning away, or perhaps the combination of all these responses to calamity brought upon others, that one of Saul Bellow's characters, Artur Sammler, a survivor of the shooting pits in Poland, has in mind when he says: 'I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door”

HumanismHolocaustDehumanization
Book:The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust
Create image

“The ultimate form of dehumanization is not to reduce humans to the rank of animals, but to elevate animals to the rank of humans; the ultimate form of depersonalization is not to take away the personhood of subjects, but to give personhood to objects; and the ultimate form of demoralization is not to lower morality to the level of caprice, but to raise caprice to the level of morality.”

HumanityMoralityArtificial IntelligenceAnimal RightsOntologyPersonhoodDehumanizationDepersonalizationCritical TheoryDemoralization
Author:Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Create image

“After spending a decade studying belonging, authenticity, and shame, I can say for certain that we are hardwired for connection--emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I'm not suggesting that we engage in a deep, meaningful relationship with the man who works at the cleaners or the woman who works at the drive-through, but I am suggesting that we stop dehumanizing people and start looking them in the eye when we speak to them. If we don't have the energy or time to do that, we should stay at home.”

EmpathyAuthenticityDehumanization
Book:Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Create image

“When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own. Martin Buber, an Austrian-born philosopher, wrote about the differences between an I-it relationship and an I-you relationship. An I-it relationship is basically what we create when we are in transactions with people whom we treat like objects--people who are simply there to serve us or complete a task. I-you relationships are characterized by human connection and empathy.”

EmpathyConnectionDehumanization
Book:Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Create image

“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.”

WarSelf RespectCaptivityTraumatic ExperiencesTraumatizedDehumanizationInhumaneWorthlessnessComplex PtsdNo Longer HumanDehumanizePrisoners Of WarHeld CaptiveSurvivors Of War
Book:Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
Create image

“Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity. Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed---faith, decency, courage---is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality...”

FaithHumanityCommunityHealingCourageSocietyAbuseVictimAffectionRecoveryGenerosityConnectionBelongingSurvivorIsolatedRejectedAltruismPtsdDecencyAbuse SurvivorsOutcastInhumanSurvivorsBondingInhumanityBondHealing InsightsTraumatic ExperiencesBondsTraumatizedDehumanizationInhumaneRecovery From AbuseHealing AbuseConnection With PeopleDehumanisationLoss Of SelfVictimizedNo Longer HumanDehumanizeDehumanizedInhumane TreatmentFeeling HumanLoss Of Social InteractionReclaiming DignityReclaiming Your Life
Book:Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Create image

“By pointing to the captain’s foolhardy departure from standard procedure, the officials shielded themselves from the disturbing image of slaves overpowering their captors and relieved themselves of the uncomfortable obligation to explain how and why the events had deviated from the prescribed pattern. But assigning blame to the captain for his carelessness afforded only partial comfort, for by seizing their opportunity, the Africans aboard the Cape Coast had done more than liberate themselves (temporarily at least) from the slave ship. Their action reminded any European who heard news of the event of what all preferred not to contemplate too closely; that their ‘accountable’ history was only as real as the violence and racial fiction at its foundation. Only by ceaseless replication of the system’s violence did African sellers and European buyers render captives in the distorted guise of human commodities to market. Only by imagining that whiteness could render seven men more powerful than a group of twice their number did European investors produce an account naturalizing social relations that had as their starting point an act of violence. Successful African uprisings against European captors were of course moments at which the undeniable free agency of the captives most disturbed Europeans—for it was in these moments that African captives invalidated the vision of the history being written in this corner of the Atlantic world and articulated their own version of a history that was ‘accountable.’ Other moments in which the agency and irrepressible humanity of the captives manifested themselves were more tragic than heroic: instances of illness and death, thwarted efforts to escape from the various settings of saltwater slavery, removal of slaves from the market by reason of ‘madness.’ In negotiating the narrow isthmus between illness and recovery, death and survival, mental coherence and insanity, captives provided the answers the slave traders needed: the Africans revealed the boundaries of the middle ground between life and death where human commodification was possible. Turning people into slaves entailed more than the completion of a market transaction. In addition, the economic exchange had to transform independent beings into human commodities whose most ‘socially relevant feature’ was their ‘exchangeability’ . . . The shore was the stage for a range of activities and practices designed to promote the pretense that human beings could convincingly play the part of their antithesis—bodies animated only by others’ calculated investment in their physical capacities.”

SlaveryAgencyFree SpiritDehumanization
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“Compassion by design can be the part of new social robots, drone based warfare robots and the new cyborgs. Dehumanization or degrading human quality or developing negative attitudes towards any human group should not be allowed through our DeepCompassion algorithms and frameworks. The superhumanization algorithms will try to empower the robots and the cyborgs with super positive qualities of compassion, caring and high human values.”

RobotsDehumanizationCyborgsSocial RobotsCyborg CultureSuperhumanizationDeepcompassionDrone Based Warfare Robots
Book:Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence AI 5.0
Create image

“Compassionate robots or compassionate cyborgs are the compassionate, self-regulating, sentience machine with the qualities of superhumanization. They are just opposite to dehumanization machines and medicines. They do not negate the positive human qualities but empower humanity with super positive qualities.”

DehumanizationCompassionate AiCyborgsCompassionate RobotsSuperhumanization
Book:Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence AI 5.0
Create image

“Turning captives into commodities was a thoroughly scientific enterprise. It turned on perfecting the practices required to commodify people and determining where those practices reached their outer limits (that is, the point at which they extinguished the lives they were meant to sustain in commodified form). Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.”

Free WillDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.”

TraumaDehumanizationCommodificationMiddle Passage
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“The imperatives of a market that valued people as commodities interposed a nearly impassable gulf between captives and any community that might claim them as new members. Captives learned that when they reached the littoral, their exchangeability on the Atlantic market outweighed any social value they might have. The price put on their persons pushed most captives beyond the possibility of eventual reintegration as members in any community. The crisis of captivity on that coast, in other words, was that only with great difficulty or great luck could the prisoners’ ‘commodity potential’ be masked or converted back into social currency.”

CommunitySlaveryDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.”

EfficiencyRationalizationDehumanizationProductionCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“One of the reasons a survivor finds it so difficult to see herself as a victim is that she has been blamed repeatedly for the abuse: "If you weren't such a whore, this wouldn't have to happen." Each time she is used and trashed, she becomes further convinced of her innate badness. She sees herself participating in forbidden sexual activity and may often get some sense of gratification from it even if she doesn't want to (it is, after all, a form of touch, and our bodies respond without the consent of our wills). This is seen as further proof that the abuse is her fault and well deserved. In her mind, she has become responsible for the actions of her abusers. She believes she is not a victim; she is a loathsome, despicable, worthless human being—if indeed she even qualifies as human. When the abuse has been sadistic in nature...these beliefs are futher entrenched.”

Child AbuseChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsIncestDehumanizationComplex PtsdVictim BlamingChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorComplex TraumaSelf BlameChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorsNo Longer Human
Book:Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse
Create image

“The human need to be visible is countered by the need to be invisible to avoid further abuse, and the need for intimacy and the dread of abuse, all pose insoluble dichotomies which promote further withdrawal from human contact, which reinforces the sense of dehumanisation.”

PtsdDomestic ViolenceAbuse SurvivorsDomestic AbuseTraumatizedDehumanizationSurvivors Of AbuseCognitive DissonanceComplex PtsdChild Abuse SurvivorsWithdrawnDehumanisationDehumanizeDehumanized
Book:Introduction to Counselling Survivors of Interpersonal Trauma
Create image

“The practice of explicitly describing others as less than humans is nowadays often frowned upon and is widely condemned. So propagandists who cultivate dehumanizing attitudes most often do this indirectly. Rather than overtly referring to a group of people as animals or monsters, they describe them in ways that invoke this image in the minds of their listeners. There are certain themes that reappear over and over in this dehumanizing discourse. The common one is criminality. The dehumanized group is made to appear inherently threatening and their criminality is represented as crudely animalistic typically involving rape and murder. Another common theme is parasitism. The dehumanized group conspires to exploit the majority sucking the blood out of decent, hard-working people and claiming privileges that they haven't earned. Images of filth and disease are also very frequent. Dehumanised groups are vectors of infection, they are dirty and contaminating. They are often thought of as invaders, outsiders who are taking us over. They are reproducing at an alarming rate and they will soon outnumber us unless we do something about it.”

PoliticsImmigrationPropagandaInhumanityDehumanizationDehumanisation
Book:On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It
Create image

“In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.”

RacismSlaveryInclusionBlack Lives MatterDehumanizationAll Lives Matter
Book:Braving the Wilderness
Create image

“You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person. There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more.”

Mental HealthDissociationTraumatizedDehumanizationDissociativeDissociatedCombat PtsdNo Longer HumanDehumanizedMilitary PtsdDissociative Ptsd
Book:Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War
Create image

“The prisoners, feral and maddened by thirst, tried to snatch discarded watermelon rinds lying along the road or to drink from muddy puddles nearby. At first, the NKVD guards simply shot those who dared rush toward the water. But soon the situation slipped out of control. When a small puddle flashed in the sun, all the prisoners surged toward this miserable source of water, ignoring fear of death, desperate shouts, and gunfire from the guards. They fought wildly, beating one another for the right to press their lips to the life-giving moisture. Peter reached the puddle among the first, but several men were already lying in it, gulping greedily and blocking others. In a fit of rage, Peter grabbed one of them by the clothes, flung him several meters aside, collapsed into his place — and fused his mouth to the water. He drank frantically. For the first few minutes, he felt nothing but a dizzying mix of rapture, pleasure, and joy as his thirst was quenched. Only when mud replaced water in his mouth did awareness of what was happening slowly begin to return. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: During a prisoner transport in Stalin’s USSR in the early years of World War II, extreme thirst drove Gulag inmates to the edge of madness. Even filthy puddles became objects of violent struggle, exposing how wartime Soviet repression reduced human survival to pure instinct.”

Historical FictionWorld War IiTotalitarianismDehumanizationStalinismPolitical PrisonersGulagSoviet HistoryNkvdDeath Marchers
Book:Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга перша. Перші кроки до світла та назад: Дитинство та занурення в ГУЛАГ.
Create image

“Diary of Dervish Advaitam (Naskaristana 2738) The other day I was reminiscing, which was the first inhumanity that lit the fuse of my life, and I think I figured it out - it was probably Islamophobia, which turned my life into a living rebuttal to every form of dehumanization disguised as heritage - perhaps that was when the dervish took root, even though on paper I wasn't a muslim - papers identify monkeys, not the human spirit; a dervish is no longer a muslim, just like an advaitin is not a hindu, and a christly person is not a christian - religion of a dervish is love, religion of an advaitin is oneness, religion of a christ is kindness. Quietly an advaitin became dervish, and emerged Dervish Advaitam, with languages of the world as master power, and sciences of the mind as master plan.”

ReligionChristOnenessSufismNondualityAdvaitaMulticulturalismInterfaithXenophobiaDehumanization
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
Create image

“As I'm sure you can imagine, it's profoundly dehumanizing to listen to a virulent the angry stranger shout about how horrible you are to people who are primed to hate you.”

BloggersDehumanizationOnline AbuseOnline HarassmentInternet TrollsDehumanize
Book:Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate
Create image

“The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room. As they breathed in the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They examined their condition. There was the foetid air, the excreta and the horror of being an oddity of the human race, with half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey. They laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else? They started to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked at the dark, small room. They said: "We are not going back there.”

DehumanizationSan PeopleThe Cave
Author:Bessie Head
Create image

“There are many ways of being witty and intelligent - almost as many as of not being, They are often the same. Like free electrons on the planet of the apes, with a time window on to a parallel universe. The only solution to the mechanization of man is Ie devenir-machine: becoming-machine. Warhol had seen this. He was the apotheosis of the machinic: total automatism, all trace of the human gone. The dream of the virtual era, by contrast, is to wrest the machine from machinicity, to make it intelligent and soulful, 'interactive', to turn it into an associate 'anthropoid' with the same affective and intellectual, sexual and reproductive functions - and, lastly, the same viruses and melancholia.”

IntelligenceDehumanizationLiteralness
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
Create image

“who is more barbaric? The alleged cannibalistic savages, who at least waited until their victims were dead before they cooked and ate them? Or the European slave traders who thrived on live meat, that is, the exploitation of these human 'animals'?”

ColonialismCannibalismObjectificationDehumanizationWhite Man S Burden
Book:Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions
Create image

“An 87 on the left, an 87 on the right. If a guest is dissatisfied with an elevator operator he can note the number and report him to the nearest starter. 'That 87 is a son-of-a-bitch, that 87 took me four floors too high, 87 87 87, I wasted two minutes in this box, that goddam son-of-a-bitch 87!' It's fun to berate a number. It's fun to use numbers. 24,035 deported to Siberia. Fun. Forty-seven dead in an airplane crash. Fun. 7,038,456 needles sold. Fun. Tonight Mister X got lucky three times. Fun. Today Miss Y died once. Fun. Right now I'm alone and I'll take a pill and have more fun.”

Death And DyingDehumanizationImmigrant ExperienceService Workers
Book:Balta drobulė
Create image