Quotes & Sayings About Being Unheard

I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded ... We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin. — Edmund Burke

We are used to the idea of giving witness to one's life as an important and noble counterpoint to being unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed or unacceptable situations. But in a slightly more pathological way, I'm not sure that we aren't seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn't famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being's natural state - and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance. — Chris Heath

You feel like a steel door has been locked; you're banging, but they just can't hear you. And being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. — Mitch Albom

I knew how to be a friend, a lover, a partner. I knew how to make someone feel cherished and seen and listened to -- everything I had myself always so desperately wanted and been afraid I might never have because I was so used to being overlooked. — Alexis Hall

The ideal of the rule of law, along with equality under the law, is one of the bases of tolerance. It means that, one way or another, governments themselves must act in accordance with the law- a responsibility they sometimes try to evade. The treatment of asylum seekers in Australia is an example, where successive Commonwealth governments have produced a series of changes to the law. In a liberal-democratic society the rule of law also means that there must be open discussion about those laws and how they are being upheld in the courts. It also means predictability- known rules about the relationship between people and governments, and in certain matters, between individuals. It is intended to mean fairness - no one should be condemned unheard, and hearings must be carried out openly by courts or tribunals as independent of governments as possible. (In their wars against asylum seekers, governments have shuffled procedures around as if they were fairground illusionists.) — Donald Horne

And so when you have lost everything, no more roads, no direction, no fixed signs, no ground, no thoughts able to resist other thoughts, when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that's when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through, defenseless being, without resistance, without batten, without skin, inundated with otherness, it's in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat. — Helene Cixous

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence. — Martin O'Malley

The most significant impact is what it does in terms of the integrity of the legislative process and the executive process, as opposed to what it does for campaigns. But to remove this unheard of process in the 1990s, where members of Congress are being pushed and shoved every Tuesday to ask for $100,000, $500,000, a million dollars from corporations, unions, and individuals, this was never allowed in American history. — Russ Feingold

Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It's not so much, what's the point? It's more like, what's the difference? — Mitch Albom

At the place where they sleep, the melody sneaks inside, touching flesh, skin, mind and thought, some feelings turning to love and beauty, others to
hatred and fear. Dreams turn on a quarter note, a semiquaver, a vibrato unheard by any still living, by any mortal being. — Maria Lima

In an era when there were few options for women, she had the audacity to be herself. She lived as she pleased, which is to say that she allowed herself the same freedoms her male contemporaries assumed as their birthright. She spoke her mind. She flouted the rules. She dressed as a man when it was illegal for women to wear pants; hung out in saloons although that was unheard of for any woman who was not a prostitute; did men's work; carried guns; whooped, cursed, hollered, strutted, and smoked cigars. Eastern readers soaked up the freedom from restraints that characterized Deadwood; and Calamity, with her innate ability to draw attention to herself just by being herself, epitomized that freedom. — Linda Jucovy

He could not imagine being bored by Susy
or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she was some one with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend. — Edith Wharton