Quotes About Dehumanization

The darkest hours of history have always been born of the efforts of one people to dehumanize another.

Lesbians discussed the dehumanizing aspect of American technology, in French.

I hate being 'labeled'. I'm no object, dont dehumanize me.

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Hatred and fear blind us. We no longer see each other. We see only the faces of monsters, and that gives us the courage to destroy each other.

We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

son ellos, los hundidos, los cimientos del campo; ellos, la masa anónima, continuamente renovada y siempre idéntica, de no-hombres que marchan y trabajan en silencio, apagada en ellos la llama divina, demasiado vacíos ya para sufrir verdaderamente. Se duda en llamarlos vivos: se duda en llamar muerte a su muerte, ante la que no temen porque están demasiado cansados para comprenderla.

The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening : marches to popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget : they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.

Rich men don't look at people like us as human beings; we're pieces they move, levers they pull to get what they want.

people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That's the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.

In this respect, the concept of "the people" is converted into, say, slaves, workers, wage earners, lesser functional officials, etc., and, as well, breeders of millions of disposable and replaceable "soldiers" who fight and die in whatever wars are designated by their higher-ups.

But what was more violent than making people disbelieve in the worth of their own lives? What was more violent than making them believe they deserved less and less every day?

I do think there's something about the digital age that is increasingly dehumanising us. We're in this very weird place where we're being pulled into experiences that aren't really experiences at all.

Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

The jail clothes are designed to strip you of any identity and reduce you to a number. You don't even feel like a human being when you're wearing them. You have no dignity.

Individual assignments treat people like interchangeable parts, widgets or screws to be shuffled from drawer to drawer. In combat under this system, new guys showed up one at a time, and often got shot all too quickly.

When one nation is at war with another nation, the political machine does everything it can to vilify the people of the other nation, so it makes it easier to kill them. Which is understandable and it's happened this way throughout history.

Fundamental violations of human rights always lead to people feeling less and less human.

Disgust is a very powerful tool for bringing about crowd violence. If a group can be dehumanized and made into the Other, the 'them,' to treat that group horribly is made much easier.

It was as though I wasn't human.' 'That's the necessary first step,' said Myrna. 'They dehumanise their victim. You've put it well.

What a marvel bureaucracy is, which can smother Such quite elementary feelings, and tag A man with a number, and set him to wag His legs and his arms at the word of command Or the blow of a whistle! He's certainly damned, Fit only for mince-meat, if a little gold lace And an upturned moustache can set him to face Bullets, and bayonets, and death, and diseases, Because some one he calls his Emperor, pleases.

It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man.