Quotessence
Home / Topics / Exploitation Quotes

Exploitation Quotes

Browse 656 quotes about Exploitation.

Related topics

Exploitation Quotes

“In 2004, the Animals in War monument outside Hyde Park in London was created by the English sculptor David Backhouse. The monument includes two life-sized bronze mules carrying supplies, as well as statues of a horse and a dog and bas-relief carvings of other animals such as camels, elephants and birds who have been used in warfare. The inscription reads: *Animals in War. This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice.* ~ John Sorenson”

“As we all know, as if forever exploiting or attempting to exploit each other were not enough, a group of sane human beings who have just reached the end of a war against a common enemy of theirs will sooner or later start or continue killing and/or fighting against each other.”

“We would do well, as Orwell counselled, to see the traces of the dystopian around us, to find the ends of those threads and how far along we are; the most accurate prophecy being that people, and the allure of domination, never really change. We can Copenhagenise our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, but provided we are still embedded in systems that reward cronyism, exploitation and short-term profiteering, that require poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups. What may save us is, in Orwell’s words, a dedication to ‘common decency’ and the perpetual knowledge that it need not be like this.”

“It's a disgrace that the most intelligent species on Earth is developing weapons and waging wars to kill their own kind. It's a disgrace that we do not exercise love, empathy, and other human qualities. It's a disgrace that we have allowed some evil individuals to exploit our innermost fears and reduce humanity to ashes. We must stop the proliferation of weapons by any and all countries and remain consistent in our staunch opposition to such counterproductive initiatives.”

“Winds are changing,” Wit whispered. Dalinar glanced at him. Wit’s eyes narrowed, and he scanned the night sky. “It’s been happening for months now. A whirlwind. Shifting and churning, blowing us round and around. Like a world spinning, but we can’t see it because we’re too much a part of it.” “World spinning. What foolishness is this?” “The foolishness of men who care, Dalinar,” Wit said. “And the brilliance of those who do not. The second depend on the first—but also exploit the first—while the first misunderstand the second, hoping that the second are more like the first. And all of their games steal our time. Second by second.”

“At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?”

“We, in the interest of the so-called progress, have been persuaded to leave the production and at times the cooking of our food to companies whose owners and employees make a living by exploiting our busyness or laziness and our innate hunger to continue living.”

“Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point. And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.”

“Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child's body, your wife's dream of love, your own dream of life when you were sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Throw out your politicians and diplomats! Take your destiny into your own hands and build your life on rock. Forget about your neighbor and look inside yourself! Your neighbor, too, will be grateful. Tell you're fellow workers all over the world that you're no longer willing to work for death but only for life. Instead of flocking to executions and shouting hurrah, hurrah, make a law for the protection of human life and its blessings. Such a law will be part of the granite foundation your house rests on. Protect your small children's love against the assaults of lascivious, frustrated men and women. Stop the mouth of the malignant old maid; expose her publicly or send her to a reform school instead of young people who are longing for love. Don;t try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation if you have a chance to become a boss. Throw away your swallowtails and top hat, and stop applying for a license to embrace your woman. Join forces with your kind in all countries; they are like you, for better or worse. Let your child grow up as nature (or 'God') intended. Don't try to improve on nature. Learn to understand it and protect it. Go to the library instead of the prize fight, go to foreign countries rather than to Coney Island. And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice inside you that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that.”

“It is a dangerous business to compare sufferings, and generally an unproductive enterprise. Yet compare we must, because most people assume that anymal suffering is somehow lesser—or of less importance—than the suffering of human beings. Why would human suffering be of greater moral or spiritual importance than anymal suffering?”

“Most people are raised with the belief that anymal exploitation is religiously sanctioned, and they will readily defend this point of view. Consequently, arguments in favor of anymal exploitation—including religious arguments—are easy to come by. On closer examination, most of these arguments do not defend anymal exploitation in general; they merely defend particular habits and practices, most oft en dietary habits and farming practices. People who identify with a given religious tradition oft en use sacred writings to defend personal habits, but such arguments tend to be both shallow and specific, contradicting core and foundational teachings. Those who pose such arguments, when questioned, often agree readily that their religion does not teach or tolerate cruel exploitation, particularly when such cruel exploitation is entirely unnecessary.”

“Man ordinarily lives in a state of unconsciousness. Man lives almost in a kind of sleep. Only in a minimal way he is awake. Only in an emergency does he suddenly become alert. Suddenly you will see a change and a alertness in him, which was not there a moment ago. Suddenly all your thinking disappears, all your dreaming disappears and all the fantasies that continuously goes on has stopped. For a moment the mind stops, there is a blank and in that intervall you are alert. Ordinarily it seems that a person can only attain to a few second of awareness in his whole life. People live like robots, machines. People go on doing things effectively and mechanically, but that does not prove that we are conscious. The ordinary man, the mob, the crowd, is unconscious and mechanical. The society wants people who are unconscious and mechanical, because they are easy to manipulate, control and exploit. It is only through consciousness that you can go beyond this mechanicalness. The spiritual journey means that you are given a new dimension, the spiritual dimension. The whole work of the spiritual journey is to bring you some consciousness of your self, of your being. It is an effort to make you conscious,to help you to rise above your biology, unconsciousness and mechanicalness. Very few people have attained to their spiritual selves. Most peoplel ive on the biological level, and they die on the biological level. Everybody has the potential, but most people do not work on it, so it remains a lost potential., The potential has to become actual. So make an effort to make your life concentrated effort to become more and more conscious. And as glimpses of consciousness start arising in you, you will be surprised that bliss will follow each moment of consciousness. As consciousness deepens, bliss deepends. Bliss is the consequence of being conscious.”

“A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should word, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous.”

“Sea World orcas work as many as eight shows a day, 365 days a year. In the ocean, these whales can swim up to ninety miles a day. In captivity, the tanks are measured in feet. In the ocean, orcas have highly evolved and cohesive matriarchal cultures. Generations of family members, combining both females and males, spend their entire lives together—with each family, or pod, communicating its own unique dialect. In captivity, little to none of this exists. Orca culture is effectively destroyed.”

“All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.”

“Capitalism has a way of making us all hypocrites. While there are people who are being exploited in making our clothes, devices, and other conveniences, we remain ignorant of their plight and continue to support companies that do those heinous acts. This principle is similar to euthanasia. We all know that billions of people are suffering worldwide, yet instead of giving them a peaceful ending, we exploit them for what they are worth and squeeze the life out of their hearts only for us to profit from their deaths.”

“There will be people who would need euthanasia, mainly to 'get out' of their current situation, one that was created by capitalism itself. Since capitalism cannot profit from someone once they are dead, its commandment now is to make all life valuable and precious and to protect it by all means, so it can continue exploiting us.”

“To be exploited fundamentally means to be confused. When you're not confused you can't be exploited because you have clarity about the situation. To confuse people you must provide contradictory information. People who really want to do you harm will provide you confusing measures of good and bad feedback because that keeps you disorientated. Evil always want to camouflage itself as virtue witch means all the bad things that evil does is called justice against immorality. So they camouflage their brutality as a mask of virtue. Camouflage is so fundamentally an aspect of the predator-prey relationships. The mugger does not camouflage himself but, that's because he can leave. He is gonna run off and you'll never find him or catch him or at least that's the goal or plan right? The relationships were you're supposed to stay and continue to provide resources are the ones were camouflage is the most essential because you're constantly looking at somebody who is a predator and that have to continually camouflage themselves as somebody who is not a predator. The most fundamental thing is the camouflage of non-empathy with empathy. This is why people who lack empathy always use the language of empathy and that's whats so confusing. There are a lot of great antidotes to this. I mean, you just ask that person questions about yourself that they dont have any self interest in knowing and find out whether they know the answers. All the things personal to you that dont have any direct impact on the other person. It's a great way to find out whether they have empathy or curiosity about you or not.”

“With all this hoarding, alarm, deceit, lack of information, plethora of disinformation, ambiguity, and confusion, I wonder whether it is time for us to start drafting a post-coronavirus manifesto? Perhaps it should contain all the things we don’t want the world to become after this pandemic is over. There are many alienating powers out there that thrived on keeping us quarantined, at distance, and distrustful of each other way before COVID-19. There are systems that thrive on our loneliness and fear. There are institutions dedicated to make sure that we don’t help each other so that we turn to them for help… Let’s not allow them to get their way once this pandemic is over! Let’s make sure that we create a world in which such blood suckers are not needed in the first place. Oh, my friends, let’s beware of the ways disaster capitalism is using the pandemic for its benefit.”

“If we lose our significance (character) we fall in ruin. The exploiters take over and sell freedom from fear, from guilt, from want. They excuse all corrupt actions. Collective status degenerates the human spirit.”

“Across the years the Negro has been a perpetual victim of economic exploitation. Prior to the Civil War the slaves worked under a system which offered neither compensation nor civil rights. Since emancipation the Negro American has continued to suffer under an essentially unreconstructed economy. He was freed without land or legal protection, and was made an outcast entitled only to the most menial jobs. Even the federal government that set him free failed to work out any long-range policy that would guarantee economic resources to a previously enslaved people--as much entitled to the land they had worked as were their former owners. The exploitation of the Negro population persisted through the Reconstruction period and continues down to the present day.”

“(Donor Countries) When are we going to understand that donor countries never give anything for free? When are we going to realize that only those with the largest role in destruction offer themselves as benefactors? They donate merely to reshape societies and ravaged lands according to their whims and desires… Their sole aim is to keep the defeated, the marginalized, the disempowered, and the impoverished in that state for as long as possible… When are we going to see that the quickest way to name the world’s greatest criminals is simply to scan the list of donor countries? November 12, 2022”

“Our desire not to be inferior to others in terms of performance, combined with the idea that we can freely choose to go the extra mile, can lead to self-exploitation. We force ourselves to go beyond what is good for us — until we burn out.”

“You see, if I simply told them that they're disgusting, that it's time to change, to respect nature at long last, to leave a margin of humanity in which there would be room even for all elephants in Africa, that wouldn't worry them much. They’d shrug their shoulders and say that I’m a visionary, a fanatic, just about fit to be locked up. So one’s got to outwit them. That’s why I’m quite willing to let them think that the elephants are only a pretext, a symbol, and that what’s underneath it is a terroristic movement for African independence, and that the defense of the elephants is merely a method of protest against the exploitation of Africa’s natural wealth by white men. That — there’s no doubt about it — has a good chance of waking them up, alarming them, making them do something, making them take me seriously; and the cleverest, most astute thing to do is obviously to deprive us of the pretext — that is to say, to ban elephant hunting completely.”

“...many women have almost always done it differently, power without control, leading without terrorizing, nurturing community and communal input and output like nurturing a family. Maybe that's one of the main reasons powerful men resist women in power; it's not just control they don't want to give up, not just privilege, but exploitation.”

“The people here had grown emaciated with hunger and toil, and the walls of their houses sighed with grief and sorrow. All the lovely flowers of this land had been transplanted to the palace to delight the eyes of the sovereign's consort, while the plump boars had been taken and served to please her sophisticated tastes. And so, the tranquil spring sun shone in vain on the grey, deserted streets of the city. And, perched atop a hill in the centre, the palace, shining with the five colours of the rainbow, towered over the corpse of the capital like a beast of prey.”

“The zoo industry is full of such contradictions. It helps people learn about the importance of animals, but not what is vitally important to the animals themselves. Sea mammals, elephants, and primates are capable of so many amazing feats, but they are incapable of demonstrating their intentions and making their own choices. The industry encourages you to think that these animals are intelligent, but not intelligent enough to have the ability to resist. The industry encourages you to care about them, so that you and your children will return for a visit. But it does not want you to care so much that you might develop empathy and begin to question whether these animals actually want to be there.”

“Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice . . . . Truth breaks free, science is popularized, and religion totters; soon it will fall, in the course of centuries--that is, tomorrow. . . . In good time we shall only have to deal with reason. [From Bizet, by William Dean. Colier Books, 1962]”