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Quotes About Dehumanization

To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism.
~ Saul Bellow
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
~ John Berger
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.
~ John Berger
slave dhows coming and slave dhows going away...On visiting the slave market, I found about 300 slaves exposed for sale...The teeth are examined, the cloth lifted to examine the lower limbs, and a stick thrown for a slave to bring, and thus exhibit his paces. Some are dragged through the crowd by hand and the price called incessantly..."[145]
~ John Bierman
If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
~ John Brunner
pseudospeciation, the reduction of alien societies to the status of inferior species, not fully human, who can be degraded without conscience. Even
~ Edward O. Wilson
The brutal consequences of "monkey" arise because that word removes some of us from humanity, placing us among nonhuman animals in the natural world. "Monkey" strengthens racist, ableist, and speciesist hierarchies. Once a person is deemed not human, then all sorts of violence become acceptable.
~ Eli Clare
Privatization is nothing but dehumanization and its side effect is likely to be worse than that of demonetization on general population.
~ Anuj Somany
The point is to destroy your empathy for the object of his or her derision through dehumanization. Perhaps that seems like no big deal, but make no mistake: You are being manipulated to hate a fellow human being.
~ Arthur C. Brooks
To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.
~ Keith Gessen
I have found that, to make a contented slave," writes Douglass "it is necessary to make a thoughtless one…He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.
~ Frederick Douglass
The better you treat a slave, the more you destroy his value as a slave, and enhance the probability of his eluding the grasp of the slaveholder; the more kindly you treat him, the more wretched you make him, while you keep him in the condition of a slave.
~ Frederick Douglass
The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.
~ Frederick Douglass
to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.
~ Frederick Douglass
My task: the dehumanization of Nature, and then the naturalization of humanity, after it has attained the pure concept of 'Nature'. Human beings and philosophers have in the past projected the human into nature — let us dehumanize nature.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.
~ Fulton J. Sheen
In the Age of the Almighty Computer, drones are the perfect warriors. They kill without remorse, obey without kidding around, and they never reveal the names of their masters.
~ Eduardo Galeano
The themes that I explore, Taika Waititi also explores: how teaching children a sense of 'us and them' breeds a sense of superiority and dehumanises what one perceives as 'otherness'; and why this theme is relevant to today's rise in the far-Right, how children and youth are indoctrinated into extremism and terrorism.
~ Christine Leunens
If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.
~ Maya Angelou
One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.
~ Rudolf Rocker
Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.
~ Margaret Atwood
Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.
~ Margaret Atwood
He has tried imagining her as a prostitute—he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters—but he can't picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.
~ Margaret Atwood
They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman.
~ Margaret Atwood