Victimhood Quotes

• Lies and victimhood make evil possible

  Dennis Prager

  Lying, Evil

  5 Copy quote

• There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

  Booker T. Washington

  Jobs, Race, Class

  Booker T. Washington (1911). “My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience”

  411 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing enables people to do evil as much as does a sense of victimhood

  Dennis Prager

  People, Evil, Doe

  21 Copy quote

• But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.

  Dean Koontz

  Responsibility, Caring, Self

  Dean Koontz (2001). “Dark Rivers of the Heart/Intensity/Sole Survivor: Three Complete Novels by Dean Koontz”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We must stop this incessant victimhood mentality.
  Somebody else will not fix things.
  Somebody else will not make me healthy.
  Somebody else will not make me happy.
  These things are my responsibility.
  Not the neighbor’s,
  not the government’s,
  not the church or the civic club.

  Joel Salatin

  Responsibility, Government, Healthy

  12 Copy quote

• When your victimhood is your empowerment, recovery is the enemy, and working on 'individual change' becomes counterproductive, even dangerous to your identity.

  Tammy Bruce

  Recovery, Empowerment, Enemy

  7 Copy quote

• There is a theory behind the culture of victimhood: It's called "intersectionality." This theory posits that racism, sexism, classism, ableism, etc. are interconnected, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing. Together they form a "matrix of oppression."

  Christina Hoff Sommers

  Racism, Together, Culture

  "Is Modern Academic Feminism Harming Women?". Interview with Clay Routledge, www.psychologytoday.com. September 4, 2016.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.

  Thomas Sowell

  Needs, Resentment, Campus

  26 Copy quote

• The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.

  George Will

  Media, Political, Culture

  George Will (2008). “One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation”, p.175, Crown Forum

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe that the fragile-flower, idea-intolerant society of victimhood that is being cultivated in many colleges today is really bad.

  Gene Weingarten

  Believe, Flower, College

  Source: live.washingtonpost.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you act like a victim, you are likely to be treated as one.

  Paulo Coelho

  Novelists, Victim, Treated

  FaceBook post by Paulo Coelho from Nov 26, 2012

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can’t stand in gratitude if you’re stuck in victimhood.

  Robin Sharma

  Gratitude, Stuck, Ifs

  FaceBook post by Robin Sharma from Apr 19, 2014

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• No one is ever a victim, although your conquerors would have you believe in your own victimhood. How else could they conquer you?

  Barbara Marciniak

  Believe, Criminal Mind, Conquer

  Barbara Marciniak (1998). “Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living”, p.161, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can be a victim or you can be rich, but you can't be both. Listen up! Every time, and I mean every time, you blame, justify, or complain, you are slitting your financial throat.

  T. Harv Eker

  Mean, Secret, Complaining

  FaceBook post by T. Harv Eker from Mar 13, 2013

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought.

  Tammy Bruce

  Liberty, Speech, Way

  Tammy Bruce (2001). “The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds”, Prima Lifestyles

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

  Bell Hooks

  Determination, Self, Black

  "Killing Rage: Ending Racism". Book by Bell Hooks, September 15, 1995.

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• If we stepped away from so much of the victimhood talk, I think that would make a big change for the better. It does limit art. The conversation wouldn't just be one-sided.

  Nelly Furtado

  Art, Thinking, Doe

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• National politics and elections are dominated by emotions, by lack of self-confidence, by fear of the other, by insecurity, by infection of the body politic by the virus of victimhood.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Self Confidence, Insecurity, Viruses

  "Europe hands its soul to the right" by Tariq Ramadan, www.theguardian.com. February 24, 2009.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

  Robert O. Paxton

  Party, Goal, Political

  Robert O. Paxton (2011). “The Anatomy of Fascism”, p.372, Penguin UK

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you inhabit any of these three roles, you're reacting to fear of victimhood, loss of control, or loss of purpose. You're always looking outside yourself, to the people and circumstances of life, for a sense of safety, security, and sanity.

  David Emerald Womeldorff

  Inspirational, Loss, People

  6 Copy quote

• Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood.

  J. G. Ballard

  Thinking, Doctors, Parent

  "Age of Unreason". Interview with Jeannette Baxter, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2004.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties--feminism and multi-culturalism--come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Two, Silence, Feminist

  Theodore Dalrymple (2005). “Our Culture, What's Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses”, Ivan R Dee

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, Mitigate, counteract, or transmute.

  Stephen A. Diamond

  Responsibility, Evil, Frustrated

  Stephen A. Diamond (1996). “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity”, p.85, SUNY Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Cancer, Self, Temptation

  5 Copy quote

• The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.

  Robert Bly

  Warrior, Boys, Men

  Robert Bly (2004). “Iron John: A Book about Men”, p.149, Da Capo Press

  75 Copy quote

  Show source