Silencing Quotes

“Crazy. It was the same word María and Tía Rosa flung at Grandpa Lázaro. The same word anyone said when they didn't understand something. "Crazy" was a way to shut people up, disregard them entirely.”
― Daniel José Older, Shadowshaper

“I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?")”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“There are no new pains.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“Those with unearned privileges often spin things as 'political correctness' to further silence those they wish to oppress.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Silencing the brain's ramblings gives the chance for wonderful thoughts to bloom.”
― steven redhead, The Solution

“In his analysis of the sublime effect, Edmund Burke termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night.”
― Jean-François Lyotard

“And the only thing worse than the silencing of a martyr, a real martyr – someone with dangerous ideas – is silencing someone who has nothing at all to say.”
― Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

“The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden.”
― Beth Bagley

“The people who support and defend those accused of child sexual abuse indiscriminately, those who join organizations dedicated to defending people who are accused of child sexual abuse with no screening whatsoever to keep out those who are guilty as charged are likewise not necessarily people engaged in an objective search for the truth. Some of them can and do use deceit, trickery, misstated research, harassment, intimidation, and charges of laundering federal money to silence their opponents.
Those of us who are the recipients of bogus lawsuits and frivolous ethics charges and phony phone calls and pickets outside our offices must know more than the research to survive such tactics. We must know something about endurance and about the importance of refusing to be intimidated.

Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998”
― Anna Salter

“Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to
say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did
their best to pluck from her.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Peace and equality will never be created if humans still use violence, silencing, and wrath.”
― Titon Rahmawan

“We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.”
― Carmel Mc Mahon, In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History