Quotes About Dehumanization

But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.

It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeches.

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers---those things are built into the operating systems and machines. Jobs that have been deskilled can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.

The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom.

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.

The extermination camps, in endeavoring to turn man into a beast, intimated that it is not life alone which makes him man.

Another fugitive, writing in the 1820s compared the sight of the whipped slave's black to that of 'a field lately ploughed' and proposed with scalding irony that 'if it were not for the stripes on my back' he would bequent his own skin to the government to be used as parchment wrapping for tht 'charter of American liberty' the US Constitution.

You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.

We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.

Language that is designed to dehumanize has consequences.

Of course, the Nazi movement was unique in terms of its killing machines and its policy of rounding up millions of people in order to systematically murder them. Nonetheless, the Nazi form of cultism has close resemblances to that of other political and religious groups, and leaves no doubt about cultist capacities for infinite murderousness.

Well, you were the Boss's poodle. And you liked it. You liked to be spit on. You weren't human. You weren't real. That's what I thought. But I was wrong, Tiny. Somewhere down in you there was something made you human. You resented being spit on. Even for money.

I suspect that it's because their belief system has segmented their world into a moral in-group and out-group so decisively that they're unconflicted about what they're doing. To them, the people they're killing are scarcely human. I think you share my concern about bad ideas being the malware that can get even psychologically normal people, biologically normal people, to do the unthinkable. How do you view this, in the context of your research?

Cattle... it called us cattle...We're hamburger, you mean.

The dehumanisation of women is a central political technology in male supremacist cultures. Male supremacy is founded on the idea that women are biologically inferior to men. The girls and women who have been destroyed, driven into silence by madness, murdered or taken their own lives, are the true witnesses of male supremacy.

Traders kept careful records of their booty. One surviving inventory from this region lists "68 head" of slaves by name, physical defects, and cash value, starting with the men, who were worth the most money, and ending with: "Child, name unknown as she is dying and cannot speak, male without value, and a small girl Callenbo, no value because she is dying; one small girl Cantunbe, no value because she is dying.

In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.

All of that requires that they do what you're talking about: destroying our empathy and reducing our faith in reason. Those guys on the border laughed when they let you through because you're not even human to them. You're a unit of something else. They rename you 'test subject' or 'enemy,' or they assign you a race or a nation or a class—and then they don't have to think about you anymore.

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.

Man] has transformed himself into a thing.

All three negative utopias make it appear that it is possible to dehumanize man completely, and yet for life to go on.

We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.