Quotes About Dehumanization

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. —Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower

I would say inhuman, but your kind perfected the clockwork of murder long ago.

Jackson's men cut off the noses of dead Indians as they counted the bodies. Afterwards there were few regrets; one of Jackson's soldiers chuckled that he had killed a boy "five or six years of age" for the reason that "he would have become an Indian someday."22

Deification dehumanizes women as much as its polar opposite, demonization. Both deny women their ordinary humanity.

It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.

The melancholy fact is that the human personality has been almost wholly disassociated and and dissolved through mechanization.

He often has difficulty conceiving of her as a human being. This tendency in abusers is known as objectification or depersonalization.

Objectification is a critical reason why an abuser tends to get worse over time. As his conscience adapts to one level of cruelty—or violence—he builds to the next.

Spiritual formation is not an option! The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being.

Grounded in the neo-platonic dualistic separation of the sacred and secular worlds, such an understanding has enabled the spread of a race-based hierarchical/patriarchal system that supported the enslavement not just of other human beings but of other Christians, the dehumanization of women and persons of color,

Each conference speaker pointed out the horrors inflicted upon people of African descent in various Latin societies and their projections of black people as subhuman.

Disposable cubicles for dispensable people.

I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.

Perhaps nowhere is our human mania for possessing, our delusion that the owned cannot have a soul of its own, more harmful to us. This disanimation justified all the horrors of the African slave trade. If the black man is so stupid that he can be enslaved, he cannot have the soul of a white man, he must be a mere animal.

Though not all, by any means, were so open about their purposes, all of them showed us how they felt about the Negro, the idea that we were people of such morality that nothing could offend us. These men, young and old, however, were less offensive than the ones who treated us like machines, as though we had no human existence whatsoever. When they paid me, they looked as though I were a stone or a post. They looked and saw nothing.

Our earliest ancestors evolved a psychological switch that allowed them to dehumanize and kill members of their own species, and our modern weapons help too, by depersonalizing killing.

Cruelty takes many forms, but all those forms depend on the human hability to dehumanize and de-individualize another person.

They are no longer human beings. I don't know any other way to describe them. There is something about them that causes an instinctive reaction of "wrong!" in normal people—

Well, you keep your place then, nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain't even funny." Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He said, "Yes, ma'am," and his voice was toneless.

If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time.

Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain't even funny." Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He said, "Yes, ma'am," and his voice was toneless. For

But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We're all such products.

Hell was born when some decided others weren't people.