Quotes About Dehumanization

In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than "the sex organs of the machine world,

A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things.

After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn't see people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way and he wouldn't notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit.

The gesiths they passed sang a cheerful, ugly song. One in four rode with poles topped by brutalised heads of Lindeymen. They did not look human. Hild pretended they were not.

Rather than humanizing technology, modern man prefers to technify man.

Lulabell realized that to Beto, she was nothing more than an inventory of body parts and labor-intensive regional dishes.

Transformando a los hombres en mercancías y dinero, este perverso mecanismo económico ha dado vida a un monstruo, sin patria y sin piedad, que acabará negando también a las futuras generaciones toda forma de esperanza.

The Nordic Supermen knew how to profit from everything. Immense casks were used to gather the human grease which had melted down at high temperatures. It was not surprising that the camp soap had such a peculiar odor. Nor was it astonishing that the internees became suspicious at the sight of certain pieces of fat sausage!

This is what free people never understand. A slave isn't a person who's being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else's.

War makes monsters of men," I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead. "And women," Mistress Coyle says.

Cannot the labourers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all, that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work.

From the first, the act of conquest, which reduces persons to the status of things, is necrophilia

For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things." For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.

As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality.

Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.

Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed