Quotes About Victims

Coates has effectively taken back this tarnished history and clarified the position of blacks in the fight against slavery. They are not passive victims waiting to be saved by enlightened whites. They are warriors, strategists and spies plotting their escape and struggling to remember everything. {from Charles' review of The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates]

Most revealing is how the letter ends—with Jack portraying himself and Fanny as common victims of Pierpont.

The manifold ways in which they [the victims of 9/11] attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.

And why is it that so many years later it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

Men were such victims to their own hormones. Machismo had killed a lot more people than PMS.

By this evening, the mad murderer would have a golden alabastron containing a deadly potion made by Cappadocian dwarfs from a recipe handed down through thirty generations, to which there was no antidote except moonbeams, and he would identify himself by etching a Greek letter onto the foreheads of all his victims as they twitched and gasped their last. The Omega Killer had been born, and it was my fault.

A 'social justice' society is a conflict which locks beneficiaries and victims alike in a struggle without end. It becomes a society torn apart by resentment over the wealth of capitalists.

In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.

People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

The older revolutionaries sought to change the social environment in the hope (if they were idealists and not mere power seekers) of changing human nature. Then coming revolutionaries will make their assault directly on human nature as they find it, in the minds and bodies of their victims or, if you prefer, their beneficiaries.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. . .they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

nobody dared in those days to question such bullies, and the freedom that is more normal these days has come too late for these victims. Auden would have helped, because the whole message of his life and his poetry is the antithesis of cruelty and meanness of spirit.

But then she reminded herself that there were plenty of people who were afraid of the police, even if they had clear consciences. These were people who had been the victims of bullying when young--bullying by severe teachers, by stronger children; there were so many ways in which people could be crushed. Such people might feat the police in the same way in which they feared all authority.

What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It's cold poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!

Children make parents as wretched as parents make children; but children do not really believe that. They can't understand how it is that those whom they take for tyrants can be hurt by the victims of the tyranny.

In a politically correct university culture packed with too many spoiled rich kids complaining of micro-aggressions, parsing every word and statement for any hint it might give offense, no matter how convoluted the logic behind it, desperately needing to separate the world into victimizers and victims. People with so much time on their hands, and so few actual struggles, that the brush of a metaphoric butterfly wing would send them howling in outrage.

We fought to hide our fear, to maintain our positions as predators rather than victims. In reality, we were all victims.

You know what goes on in this world. They don't understand. They don't see that long after their laughter subsides, in search of the next cheap thrill, their victims are still hearing the taunts in their heads. A cacophony of degrading noise, poisoning perception.

This article reports that the symptoms are, and I quote, 'high fever, clogged airways, and delirium. At times, blood pours from noses, ears, and eye sockets. Victims lay in agony. Many have been known to drown in their own lungs. There have been cases of cyanosis reported in which the victim's body turns almost black, for which some are labeling this another Black Plague—

We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear - by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control.

Oddly then, in our search for meaning, we often assign victims too much blame for their assaults, and offenders too little. Our inconsistencies do not seem to trouble us, but they are truly puzzling. After all, if the offender is not to blame for his behavior, why would the victim be, no matter what she did our didn't do? Our views make sense, however, if you think that we are trying to reassure ourselves that we are not helpless and, that, in any case, no one is out to get us.

In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrary, most offenders had been charged with and/or convicted of from one to three victims. In the interviews I have done, they have admitted to roughly 10 to 1,250 victims. What was truly frightening was that all the offenders had been reported before by children, and the reports had been ignored.