Dehumanize Quotes

“Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.
Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed---faith, decency, courage---is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality...”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“The human need to be visible is countered by the need to be invisible to avoid further abuse, and the need for intimacy and the dread of abuse, all pose insoluble dichotomies which promote further withdrawal from human contact, which reinforces the sense of dehumanisation.”
― Christiane Sanderson, Introduction to Counselling Survivors of Interpersonal Trauma

“Would the war dehumanize me so that I, too, could "field trip" enemy dead with such nonchalance?”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

“The history of hysteria is a history of the relation between the colonizing father and the colonized devalued other.”
― Judith L. Alpert, SEXUAL ABUSE RECALLED: Treating Trauma in the Era of the Recovered Memory Debate

“I've got a theory about uniforms. I think they design them so that you become, like, a nonperson, so that you're not Daisy Ramirez, a Human Being, but instead a thing that brings people pizza and exchanges their tickets for plastic dinosaurs. It's like the uniform is designed to hide me.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“As I'm sure you can imagine, it's profoundly dehumanizing to listen to a virulent the angry stranger shout about how horrible you are to people who are primed to hate you.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate