Quotes About Dehumanization

When I search for man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil.

Brother,' 'sister,' 'comrade' are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie because in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my scheming.

Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

Dehumanizing and holding people accountable are mutually exclusive. Humiliation and dehumanizing are not accountability or social justice tools, they're emotional off-loading at best, emotional self-indulgence at worst. And if our faith asks us to find the face of God in everyone we meet, that should include the politicians, media, and strangers on Twitter with whom we most violently disagree. When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our faith.

When we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric or promote dehumanizing images, we diminish our own humanity in the process. When we reduce Muslim people to terrorists or Mexicans to "illegals" or police officers to pigs, it says nothing at all about the people we're attacking. It does, however, say volumes about who we are and the degree to which we're operating in our integrity.

But then, if it's the case that we can care about citizens and the police, shouldn't the rallying cry just be All Lives Matter? No. Because the humanity wasn't stripped from all lives the way it was stripped from the lives of black citizens. 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

The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is at best, unintentional and reflexive; at worst, it's stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready made filing system. It's so handy when we want to quickly characterize people. But, yet we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.

There is a line. It's etched from dignity. And raging, fearful people from the right and left are crossing it at unprecedented rates every single day. We must never tolerate dehumanization—the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history.

With awareness about how dehumanization works comes the responsibility to call out dangerous language when we recognize it.

Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become an exercise in dehumanization. And social media are the primary platforms for our dehumanizing behavior. On Twitter and Facebook we can rapidly push the people with whom we disagree into the dangerous territory of moral exclusion, with little to no accountability, and often in complete anonymity.

Everyone wants to know why customer service has gone to hell in a handbasket. I want to know why customer behavior has gone to hell in a handbasket. When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own.

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.

The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is, at best, unintentional and reflexive. At worst, it is stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready-made filing system, so handy when we want to quickly characterize people, but we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.

Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation.

In the final forms of moral disengagement, wrongdoers treat adversaries as subhuman animalistic, demonic beings. Expunging any sense of shared humanity eliminates moral restraints.

I'd always been treated like an object, not like a human.

I've been in some situations where people have treated me like a fascinating toy. You know, it's just like an interesting kind of fun thing to have a play with. It's very weird for me. I feel like a tiny baby.

Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value.

The closest I had ever come to seeing human nakedness before was in a movie. A documentary. It showed hundreds and hundreds of naked Jews, men, women, and children, being escorted by armed Nazi guards and barking German shepherds to their deaths. All the Jews were naked. Not undressed. Naked. And it seemed to me then, while I watched that documentary, that it wasn't just the Jews that the Nazis wanted annihilated but the very concept of nakedness as well.

'Night' may be one of the most important books that people can read today. It is a story of how hate can slowly take over a society. It shows what happens when people are dehumanized.

I finally got to watch 'Roots' in my mid-teens, on a video rental. Slowly and meticulously Roots fed its black characters through the mincing machine of American slavery. People with names, hopes and family connections were destroyed and dehumanised before my eyes.

Numbers do not feel. Do not bleed or weep or hope. They do not know bravery or sacrifice. Love or allegiance. At the very apex of callousness you will find only ones and zeroes.

Humans tried to develop intelligent machines as secondary reflex systems, turning over primary decisions to mechanical servants. Gradually, though, the creators did not leave enough to do for themselves; they began to feel alienated, dehumanized, and even manipulated. Eventually humans became little more than decisionless robots themselves, left without an understanding of their natural existence.