Objectify Quotes & Sayings

Most people in our culture have been treated like objects all their lives. This is the source of the wound to the soul underlying most of the human misery that therapists encounter. Because people have come to experience themselves as objects, they in turn objectify other people and commodify the world. They feel alienated, isolated, and empty, believing their lives hold no meaning. — Linda Buzzell

She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale.
"DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted.
Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts."
"That's not any better! — John Green

Boys are much more likely to objectify girls bodies, while boys are seen by girls as whole people. — John Green

I thought, "Oh, my god, that's what happens every time I talk with a journalist in the middle of shooting and I talk about my character. I describe him, I objectify him, and I kill him." So, I've never spoken with a journalist in the middle of a film. I don't do the EPK until the very end of a film. I can't talk about Kiefer's process, but what he brings to the table is beautiful. — Donald Sutherland

It is an absolute impossibility in this society to reversely sexually objectify heterosexual men, just as it is impossible for a poor person of color to be a racist. Such extreme prejudice must be accompanied by the power of society's approval and legislation. While women and poor people of color may become intolerant, personally abusive, even hateful, they do not have enough power to be racist or sexist. — Ana Castillo

Diet/food/eating should NEVER be the means by which you objectify yourself, disconnect from yourself, judge yourself, or worst of all, reject and hate yourself. — Scott Abel

Being a dominatrix, sticking my foot up people's asses for money, necessitated that I divorce myself from any sort of objective perspective on what I was doing. In order to think about things as a writer you have to objectify your experience. I couldn't have been enacting that experience if I was objectifying it. — Melissa Febos

Those who believe they are ugly / objectify the rest of us. — Judy Grahn

It is one step, and a giant one, to see clearly and participate in the love that flows between the persons of the Trinity, but even here, God is seen as the object of his own love. It is yet another step to realize that God is beyond all subject and object and is Himself love without subject or object. This is the step beyond our highest experiences of love and union, a step in which self is not around to divide, separate, objectify or claim anything for itself. Self does not know God; it cannot love him, and from the beginning has never done so. — Bernadette Roberts

For we rationalize, objectify, and personalize the process of the game exactly as we do that of a play, a drama. For, finally, it is a drama, with meaning for our lives. Why else would we watch it? — David Mamet

Rude wasn't so much a heel who happened to be attractive as he was a 100 percent pure concentrate of machismo and self-absorption, a Lothario for his own sake. He could have any woman he wanted, but his objective was never love or even lust; it was heterosexual avidity purely for show. And he seemed not so much to objectify women as to coolly demean them. The object of his affection was solely himself. It was hardcore pornography minus the sex.* — Anonymous

I don't objectify myself. I hate looking at pictures of myself, they're usually awful. — Ian Astbury

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetise the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images. — Susan Sontag

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I'm feeling now. It's so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

the abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause, at least temporarily, a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that the people in whom this reaction occurs have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well. This — John Leslie Mackie

So what is transgressive in the practice of this secret Tantra is the gesture not to elide the difference that women present. What does this mean? That women represent not merely objects, property, or the possibility of sexual gratification, but an opening point to the possibility of difference as the subjectivity of the other. . .Rather, a recognition of the difference women present offers the possibility of a choice not to objectify women. This recognition recodes gendered relations inscribing woman discursively in the place of the subject. — Loriliai Biernacki

Some girls bragged to me that they could "have sex like a guy," by which they meant they could engage without emotion, they could objectify their partners as fully and reductively as boys often objectified them. That seemed a sad, low road to equality. What if, instead, they expected boys to be as sexually giving as girls? What if they were taught that all sexual partners, whether total strangers or intimates, deserved esteem and generosity, just as people do in any human interaction? What if they refused to settle for anything less? — Peggy Orenstein

The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me. — Barbara Kruger

The traditional gross anatomy lab represented a sort of sink-or-swim mentality about dealing with death. To cope with what was being asked of them, medical students had to find ways to desensitize themselves. They quickly learned to objectify cadavers, to think of the dead as structures and tissues, and not a former human being. Humor--at the cadaver's expense--was tolerated, condoned even. — Mary Roach

I don't objectify women. I'd like to think that I'm optimizing their hardware. — Ted Nugent

I have four daughters. A lot of the time, I don't allow myself to be in projects that objectify women. — Terry Crews

A bunch of liberals wanted to outlaw men gazing at women because the gaze was said to objectify women. Sorry, liberals, it can't be helped among the heterosexual crowd. — Rush Limbaugh

Our modern economy privileges pure profit, momentary transactions and rapid fluidity. Part of craft's anchoring role is that it helps to objectify experience and also to slow down labor. It is not about quick transactions or easy victories. That slow tempo of craftwork, of taking the time you need to do something well, is profoundly stabilizing to individuals. — Richard Sennett

You want your partner to objectify you. — Patricia Arquette

She trailed after him, admiring the line of his back. He began climbing the stairs, and she sighed with pleasure. Every bit of him was gorgeous. "Do you mind if I objectify you?"
"Please do," he said over his shoulder. "Particularly my knees, as they are oft-neglected."
"Maybe if you ever got your pants off, they wouldn't be."
"It hardly matters, sweet; once they've come off, the attention isn't likely to center on my absurdly handsome knees. — Meljean Brook

Oh shit did you just dis the feminine gender
I'll pummel your ass then stick you in a blender
You think I like Tori and Ani so I can't rhyme
But I got flow like Ghostbusters got slime
Objectify women and it's fuckin' on
You'll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon. — John Green

It occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. — Tim O'Brien

Chance or accident is not responsible for the things that happen to you, nor is predestined fate the author of your fortune or misfortune. Your subconscious impressions determine the conditions of your world. The subconscious is not selective; it is impersonal and no respecter of persons. The subconscious is not concerned with the truth or falsity of your feeling. It always accepts as true that which you feel to be true. Feeling is the assent of the subconscious to the truth of that which is declared to be true. Because of this quality of the subconscious there is nothing impossible to man. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and feel as true, the subconscious can and must objectify. Your feelings create the pattern from which your world is fashioned, and a change of feeling is a change of pattern. — Neville Goddard

Capture the feeling associated with your realized wish by assuming the feeling that would be yours were you already in possession of the thing you desire, and your wish will objectify itself. — Neville Goddard

Prince is king to me. As this half-naked, short black guy who looked like a girl in the 70s and 80s, he was talking about women in a way that was very unusual because he didn't objectify them. — Robyn

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. — Tim O'Brien

The issue is not the thing, but rather our approach to the thing. Same as with food. Our temptation is to objectify the problem, trying to locate sin in the stuff - in the tobacco, in the alcohol, in the gun, in the donut - instead of where sin is actually located, which is right under the breastbone. — Douglas Wilson

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express ... — Marianne Moore

If we harm someone else, we're inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being - someone who wants to be happy, just as we do. — Sharon Salzberg

You think you are somebody and that is where the problem begins. You're really not somebody, you're everybody. You objectify yourself into thinking that you are a particular state of being. — Frederick Lenz

To name is to dominate, to categorize, to subjugate and, quite literally, to objectify — Charles Eisenstein

I am saddened when I hear these words -this is not the person I knew - because those words objectify the person suffering from Alzheimer's. When you objectify a person you also dehumanize them. Once dehumanized the person becomes a villain. — Bob DeMarco

A terroir only exists by virtue of one's childhood mythology ... we have invented these words of tradition rooted deep in the land and identity of a region ... because we want to solidify and objectify the magical, bygone years that preceded the horror of becoming an adult. — Muriel Barbery

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling. — Susanne Katherina Langer

A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an "idea" already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form. — Gilbert Sorrentino

Feminism is liberalism, and look at what it's doing, look at what it's promoting, look at what it's condoning. All the while, we have to live in this lie that there's some sort of Republican War on Women. We don't do this to women! We don't objectify women like this. — Rush Limbaugh

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world. — Ruth Hubbard

Men. We love them. We respect them. But we rarely get to objectify them. — Leslie Mann

I would say that, of course, it is wrong to objectify women. But at the same time, entertainment should not be inter-mingled with commodification. — Malaika Arora Khan

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems. — Roger Ebert

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do. — Tony Kushner

The truth is, a man can choose to objectify a woman whether she's wearing a bikini or a burqa. We don't stop lust by covering up the female form; we stop lust by teaching men to treat women as human beings worthy of respect. — Rachel Held Evans

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality. — Peter Straub

But since anxiety attacks the foundation (core, essence) of the personality, the individual cannot 'stand outside' the threat, cannot objectify it. Thereby, one is powerless to take steps to confront it. One cannot fight what one does not know. In common parlance, one feels caught, or if the anxiety is severe, overwhelmed; one is afraid but uncertain of what one is afraid. The fact that anxiety is a threat to the essential, rather than to the peripheral, security of the person has led some authors like Freud and Sullivan to describe it as a 'cosmic' experience. It is 'cosmic' in that it invades us totally, penetrating our whole subjective universe. We cannot stand outside it to objectify it. We cannot see it separately from ourselves, for the very perception with which we look will also be invaded by anxiety. — Rollo May