Quotessence
Home / Topics / Victimhood Quotes

Victimhood Quotes

Browse 135 quotes about Victimhood.

Related topics

Victimhood Quotes

“By succumbing to external conditioning and looking outside ourselves for answers, thus denying the power of our imagination and ignoring the only viable path forward into the future (that of internal transformation), we’re bound to just keep pouring gasoline on a world already on fire.”

“I think the big lie in life is that there is this coasting period ahead, that sometime in the future we can turn on pilot mode. We think once a particular hurdle is jumped or once we finally check off all of life's problematic to dos, then it will be smooth sailing. The reality of life is that this point doesn’t exist. We have to learn that what we are actually seeking is the high we get while we are running, not the rest or reward afterwards.”

“In a prior age, the human experience was understood as the temporal embodiment of desire, delight, fear, grief, faith, love, hope, hatred, horror, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, loyalty, fidelity, sublimity, desperation, chagrin, anger, fury, wrath, distress, discomposure, shame, dignity, indignity, glory, contempt, slight, heartbreak, fondness, tenderness, adoration, infatuation, compassion, goodwill, worship, sorrow, anguish, despair, woe, dejection, despondency, duty, angst, reverence, respect, esteem, exaltation, melancholy, disquiet, weariness, felicity, glee, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, euphoria, exhilaration, rhapsody, brotherhood, contemplation, mediation, surrender, fancy, impulse, yearning, thirst, hankering, pining, enthusiasm, need, obligation, fancy, mystery, helplessness, luck, recklessness, boldness, fearlessness, wildness, sorrow, regret, gloom, heavyheartedness, and dreaminess and ten thousand others. These are the sentiments which great art compels us to feel. But mediocre art truncates the human experience. It prunes and lops off all the diversity and richness of life and leaves us with little more than lust, amusement, self-fulfillment, and the resentment which comes from our endless search for the power that now attends victimhood.”

“Attitude Is Everything We live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations. The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances? When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.”

“We call everything 'trauma' now. We call everything 'toxic.' Someone didn't text you back fast enough? They’re toxic. You had a mildly unpleasant conversation with your boss? You’re traumatized. You are stealing the valor of the damned! You are hijacking the vocabulary of the genuinely broken, the people who have survived actual nightmares. People who have looked the absolute worst of humanity in the face and had to figure out how to keep breathing. And you’re using their vocabulary to describe a mild inconvenience? It makes me sick. It’s an insult to the truly ruined.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Under a man's hands--crush of his body--exigent breath--I remembered how to perform. Yes when I meant no. Lust or satisfaction or pleasure. Gratitude, as required, knowing that, naked beneath a man's disappointment, there lay this possibility of violence, as pungent and close-fitting as skin. One pound of flesh, paid freely, was preferable to a bloodier extraction. My past roles of sex kitten and hard bitch, blushing penitent, coy exotic, tease: I'd learned, long before this day, that I could play anything to avoid the role of victim.”

“Rare is the Stalin-like individual, who lacks empathy and who seems to take pleasure in inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted to others; common is the -virtuous citizen acting in the name of righteous causes-.”

“To have a knee-jerk reaction to technology is to think like a victim. This is how the Dragon wants you to think—in all ways at all times. Its entire control apparatus is predicated on your tacit or explicit acceptance of victim mentality. I’d argue that this even applies to the world’s predatory class, the so-called elites, those puffed-up minions who, while they may get a rush out of preying on others, must on some level suspect they themselves are ultimately just Dragon food. But we, not technology, and not even the Dragon, are the real creators here. The Dragon knows this. That’s why it uses us to build its world for it, since apparently it can’t do so on its own—and it’s high time we figured this out for ourselves.”

“Stop telling me I’m oppressed.....I’m not a victim. I don’t know why feminists are so hellbent on characterizing me as one.....Feminists don’t speak for me. They’re not my voice. They’re not my representation. I owe them nothing, except maybe a shred of sympathy. How miserable must they be to see oppression at every turn?...You DON’T speak for me. You DON’T represent me or my concerns....We’re living proof that the modern day feminist movement is a crock. Feminists are victims of their own delusions, and we’ll never buy what they’re selling.”

“Any conversation on the left these days, it's always so competitive, it's always each person trying to outperform the person before them in terms of their oppression or their lack of privilege or their personal trauma or, like, the fact that actually they’re Jewish or actually they’re bisexual, or guess what, they’re a quarter this or that ethnicity, which gives them the right to speak or the right to take offence or whatever. It’s a marketplace! Yet again! You can dress it up in the language of sensitivity and social justice and blah blah blah, but the point of intersectionality isn’t to learn how to transcend our differences, or eliminate them, the point isn’t solidarity, it’s about shoring up your brand, cornering the market, everyone out for themselves, maximising profit and minimising risk—' ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Amber said. ‘It locks us into our differences,’ Tony said, ‘it’s segregationist. And it’s also just advertising. It’s brand management. That’s my point. We’re still inside the fucking paradigm!”

“Just as the symbol of Christ's crucifix encapsulates the triumph of the victim and has been exploited historically as a means to exert power over others, the rainbow Pride flag now serves a similar function.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Bad social science might result from systematic bias, but to embrace blame analysis as a way of evaluating theory or to transform sociology into advocacy for the oppressed is to do something else entirely.”

“Victimhood culture makes it hard to avoid wrongdoing. If you have any kind of privilege, the social world is full of peril; you always risk giving offense. Engage in small talk and you might be guilty of a microaggression. Cook a new dish or adopt a new hairstyle and you might be guilty of cultural appropiation. Teach about something unpleasant and you might be guilty of triggering someone. Express your religions or political beliefs and you might be guilty of violence. Whatever you do, you must do it in a way that is supportive of victims and reproachful of their oppressors.”

“Magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offender are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors are all integral to the microaggression program but possibly harmful to mental health.”

“Microaggression complaints arise from a culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display a high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to authorities and other third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”

“Sociology and social justice each have potential only when operating within their limits. The promise that a science of social life could aid social justice efforts was reasonable, but when social justice becomes an ideology unmoored from empirical reality, it needs no science.”

“Thus, unless we actively seek out this information, it can remain below our radar. Or perhaps we conceal the truth because we want to protect our children from the harsh realities of gender-based violence. One could argue that protecting children in this way as a means of instilling in them a robust sense of security is an important aspect of early childhood development. But at some point, sticking to this story becomes counterproductive, for as long as we are taught that the world is a benign place for women, when harm comes to us the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that it is our fault.”

“It is all too easy, in the atmosphere of intellectual fog that pervades Liberal and Humanist circles today, to allow sympathy for an unfortunate person to pass over into receptivity to his ideas. The Nihilist, to be sure, is in some sense "sick," and his sickness is a testimony to the sickness of an age whose best--as well as worst--elements turn to Nihilism; but sickness is not cured, nor even properly diagnosed by "sympathy." In any case there is no such thing as an entirely "innocent victim.”

“All too often, students from nonmaterially privileged backgrounds assume a position of passivity—they be have as victims, as though they can only be acted upon against their will. Ultimately, they end up feeling they can only reject or accept the norms imposed upon them. This either/or often sets them up for disappointment and failure.”

“Where we direct our attentive focus shapes and informs—literally and materially—our experienced reality. Prolonged attention creates greater intensity. Like a magnifying glass intensifying the sun’s rays, our attention amplifies whatever it focuses on. If we’re to be responsible creators of our experience, as opposed to haphazard victims of it, it’s incumbent on us to … attentively choose our path through the Matrix with utmost … attention to detail.”

“Just as you can allow your outcomes to determine how you behave and react, you can also choose to reclaim your agency and apply it to your own circumstances. By exercising this unique right of selecting your own responses, you may turn from a victim to an agent who is more in control of your life.”