48 Quotes About Dehumanization

On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

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.

When you say Jonah seems broken, what do you mean?" Justine said."I think he's broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness," I said. People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, like he was something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it's no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs.

Stokes started by explaining how often the term "servant" is used as a euphemism for "slave" in New England and how there is a presumption that Africans here were somehow "smarter" and treated better than those in the South. This misperception, he pushed, is because people don't want to remember the dehumanization. Without hesitating, he went on to say, Slavery is violent, grotesque, vulgar, and we are all implicated in how it denigrates humanity.

. . . the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle; with sorting and feeding and starvation and suffocation and pestilence and death; with slave ship stenches and mutinies of crew and cargo; with the jettying of cargoes before the guns of British cruisers; with auction blocks and sales and profits and losses

Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing.

Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.

People want to believe these research studies are about something simple that they can relate to like winning a contest. They don’t want to think about why a government would want to experiment on its citizens.They do it because they can, I said. Because you don’t see us as people.