Quotes About Dehumanization

Dehumanization isn't a way of talking. It's a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.

Before dehumanizing a population, we set them apart as a "race." That is, a variety of people who are fundamentally different from "us." The folk notion of race is very much an artificial construction.

Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. "They are the ones who are sick," fumed Limbaugh.

For dehumanization to occur the target group must first be essentialized. They, the others, must be seen as a distinct kind of person: not just superficially different, but radically so. This pattern is borne out by all of the cases of dehumanization that have been surveyed so far in this book.

Michael Savage (the pseudonym of Michael Alan Weiner) is another popular radio host whose syndicated radio program is followed by 8 to 10 million listeners. Like Limbaugh, Savage derided the detainees as "subhuman" and "vermin," and suggested that forcible conversion to Christianity is "probably the only thing that can turn them into human beings.

Early Muslim references to dehumanization were overtly ethnocentric. Almost without exception, the people who are transformed into subhuman creatures—specifically, pigs, apes, and rats—are Jews.

Unlike these verses from the Koran, references to dehumanization in the hadith compiled two or three centuries later have a distinctly anti-Jewish flavor. They describe how a group of Israelites were transformed into rats, how unbelievers are turned into monkeys and pigs, and how Abraham's father was transformed into an animal and hurled into the raging fires of hell.

n medieval Europe, a new slave would place his head under his master's arm, and have a strap placed around his neck, in imitation of a sheep or cow, and in eighteenth-century Britain, goldsmiths advertised silver padlocks "For blacks or dogs.

By the Law of Slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel.

Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood.

In any kind of conflict, you have a certain dehumanization that comes along with it. And it's important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.

Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable!

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

Extreme nationalism objectifies and dehumanizes those from other countries.

even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded.

Our world is going through a crisis of dehumanization, breakup of family life, a general loss of moral values.

This opportunistic shift from Nazis to communists, both typically depicted as producing terrorized and mindlessly conformist hierarchical societies, suggests that the propaganda and ideology of the period generated and played upon deep-seated anxieties about regimentation and dehumanization, the sources of which can as easily be found in Eisenhower's placid decade.

Distance can breed suspicion, and it can make enemies hardly worthy of consideration as human beings. Much easier to consider killing.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Turning the pages of crime novels it occurs to me to ask how it's possible to write so much without saying the word "pain," "life," or "anxiety." I reject this stupid dehumanization. The behaving without motive. The horrific shutting out of what is most vital or important.

When you dehumanize a group, there's lasting consequences because they know that they're being dehumanized.

Millions of human vermin swarm sweating along the night-arched cavernous roads. (Happily rapid chemical processes will disintegrate them all.)

Should we in America refuse to alter our lifestyle, I believe we will experience increasing dehumanization - of ourselves- both individually and corporately. To begin to share on a broad scale, therefore, is not just a matter of obedience to God or of altruism but rather a necessary requirement for remaining human.

Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.