Real Victims Quotes & Sayings

Honour and courtesy and justice ... they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them to us like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims. — Robin Hobb

What's on the outside to prevent their return? They are now convicted felons, a branding they will never be able to shake. The odds were stacked against them to begin with, and now that they're tagged as felons, life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. Our prisons are packed. Our streets are filled with drugs. Who's winning the war? — John Grisham

Killing of animals for food is one thing, but on the other hand they do not exist simply as things to be slaughtered. This is true of fishing, too. Many men fish and leave their victims to rot and stink. But what about the fish? Has he no rights - not to be romanticized as though he were a man - but real rights? — Francis Schaeffer

The killing happened amid an outburst of deadly violence across the District that claimed six lives in six days. The victims include a community news reporter who police said was waiting for a bus when she was shot by someone aiming at another person; and a motorist killed when a passenger opened fire from another vehicle on the Anacostia Freeway. The killings bring the District's homicide count to 50, up from 45 at this time last year. At Friday night's vigil, Gliss's pastor, Bishop Melvin G. Brown of Greater New Hope Baptist Church, acknowledged national attention on police use of deadly force. But he urged mourners to address dangers closer to home. "Can we be real tonight?" Brown said. "Most of the violence, most of the killing comes from us killing other folk. Young black folk killing other young black folk. — Anonymous

The real heroes are those ones who are forgotten, forsaken and remain the nameless ones, in the history of time. — Auliq Ice

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act. — Rebecca Solnit

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses. — Annie Dillard

A lot of people feel like they're victims in life, and they'll often point to past events, perhaps growing up with an abusive parent or in a dysfunctional family. Most psychologists believe that about 85 percent of families are dysfunctional, so all of a sudden you're not so unique. My parents were alcoholics. My dad abused me. My mother divorced him when I was six ... I mean, that's almost everybody's story in some form or not. The real question is, what are you going to do now? What do you choose now? Because you can either keep focusing on that, or you can focus on what you want. And when people start focusing on what they want, what they don't want falls away, and what they want expands, and the other part disappears. (Jack Canfield) — Rhonda Byrne

Most kids who left or got kicked out of the FLDS ran into very real, very debilitating issues. Boys and girls who had lived all their lives to please their families, church, and Prophet were cut from family ties with no education. Ninety percent or more of them wound up heavily involved in drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, and prostitution, or as the victims of some kind of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. I — Rebecca Musser

No one is interested in real victims, or real criminals. Not local courts, not their fellow citizens, not publishers, and not readers. Everyone simply refuses to believe them. An imaginary crime is much more convincing; reality is too real. They can only identify with an invented crime, only paper evil can excite them. — Dubravka Ugresic

The Internet has spawned an abusive malevolent platform that cyber stalkers and trolls can use to harm people in the real world and ruin their victims lives forever with their permanent posts. Cyberspace can also be used to hunt those that prey on innocent people, so that those who live by the malicious words may also feel the repugnant feeling of being stalked and hunted even in their own false sense of anonymity. — Don A. Holbrook

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives. — Azar Nafisi

Victim-stancing - whereby the offender claims and believes that s/he is the real victim (one of the most prevalent sophistries in the false memory controversies) — Harvey L. Schwartz

People don't know anymore why we've had eight years of war. Why their children have died ... This entire war was just a big setup to destroy both the Iranian and the Iraqi armies. The former was the most powerful in the Middle East in 1980, and the latter represented a real danger to Israel. The West sold weapons to both camps and we, we were stupid enough to enter into this cynical game ... eight years of war for nothing! So now the state names streets after martyrs to flatter the families of the victims. In this way, perhaps, they'll find some meaning in all this absurdity. — Marjane Satrapi

It is Martin King who taught that a real moral struggle
seeks to win partners, not to leave victims. — Maulana Karenga

The trap of resentment. It is probably the worst mental prison in the world. It is the inability to let go of anger and the perceived or real injustices we suffer. Some people let one or two, or maybe ten unpleasant experiences poison the rest of their lives. They let their anger ferment and rot their personality. They end up seeing themselves as victims of their parents, teachers, their peers and preachers. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment. — Thornton Wilder

It's ludicrous to even talk about (Marquis) de Sade, let alone indulge in all that, when people are being tortured and suffering for real, not for sexual games. I have no interest either in being a victim or in turning others into victims. — Francoise Gilot

A Colombia without coca and without conflict was an impossible dream just a few years or decades ago, and today I can tell you it is a real possibility. Just imagine it. We have already begun discussion of the last two substantive points: victims and the end of the conflict. — Juan Manuel Santos

They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free - and not so that they could cast loose from Earth's terrible situation, not at all - rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act. — Kim Stanley Robinson

I am delighted to be part of this Women's Aid campaign - the statistics are frightening. I've spent time with the victims of these cowardly acts, and it's heartbreaking. Everyday women and children are being abused in their own homes. I am standing up and saying that I am a Real Man, and that violence against women and children has to end. — Gethin Jones

Alarmed successively by every fashionable medical terror of the day, she dosed her children with every specific which was publicly advertised or privately recommended ... The consequence was, that the dangers, which had at first been imaginary, became real: these little victims of domestic medicine never had a day's health: they looked, and were, more dead than alive. — Maria Edgeworth

It is surprising to see how often the worst people in the world - rapists interviewed in prison, say - see themselves as the real victims. They are wrong to see themselves as innocents, but we are wrong as well to see them as different creatures from the rest of us. If you want to think about evil, real evil, a better way to proceed is this: Don't think about what other people have done to you; think instead about your own actions that hurt others, that made others want you to apologize and make amends. Don't think about other nations' atrocities toward your country and its allies; think instead about the actions of your country that other people rage against. Your — Paul Bloom

life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. — John Grisham

No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs [e.g. the sacrifice of many victims] of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves? — Maximilian Kolbe

It is not enough for a surgeon to have the textbook knowledge of how to treat trauma victims - to understand the science of penetrating wounds, the damage they cause, the different approaches to diagnosis and treatment, the importance of acting quickly. One must also grasp the clinical reality, with its nuances of timing and sequence. One needs practice to achieve mastery, a body of experience before one achieves real success. And if what we are missing when we fail is individual skill, then what is needed is simply more training and practice. — Atul Gawande

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the victims and heroes of September 11th. As we commemorate the anniversary of 9-11, we must also remember that the threat is still very real today. — Michael McCaul

Real life is nothing like television, there are no Special Victims Units like you see on TV protectively guiding women through the process. The police will act like just because they didn't kill you, they didn't somehow end your life. — Anais Torres

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. — Aldous Huxley

Evil exists. Evil is real. One of the hallmarks of evil is that it seeks to convince its victims that it exists 'out there.' — John Ortberg

When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious. — Logan Pearsall Smith

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. — W. Somerset Maugham

The real victims of men are other men. — Gloria Emerson

We don't think of ourselves as 'unforgiving' or 'bitter'- those words imply that we are somehow personally responsible. We prefer to talk about how deeply we have been 'hurt', implying that we are merely helpless victims. Are those who have been deeply wounded destined to live damaged lives? Or is there real healing for deep hurt? I say there is ... We've also deceived ourselves into believing that we can love and serve God and be 'good Christians,' while failing to forgive. When are we going to get honest? — Byron Paulus

Like everyone, I'm saddened and horrified by this. All I'll say is that I'm personally trying to pay more attention to the victims than to their murderer. I certainly will not be mentioning the murderer. I don't think he warrants our attention-particularly since he so clearly wanted it. — John Green

Most of us tend to view childhood as a time of carefree pleasure. Those of us who have looked at the real condition of children in America, however, see a very different picture-one in which children are victims of terrible discrimination, prejudice, and abuse. They need protection. But the protection they need most is to have the protection of civil rights, so that they can be regarded as full persons under the law. — Richard Farson

After all, is it not wondrous that we are allowed to be both witnesses and victims of the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue? And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. — Thomas Ligotti

Want to control a people? Teach them to think of themselves as victims. Tell them they have an enemy, and that enemy is responsible for all their woes. It doesn't have to be a real enemy; it doesn't even have to make sense. Just tell it to them often enough, and they will come to believe it. Once they do, you can rob them of their money, time, and freedom, so long as you keep their eyes fixed on the 'enemy' you have created for them. — Aaron Lee Yeager

But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide hipped mother, auwesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, mothers who would fight for us, who would kill for us, and die for us. — Janet Fitch

There is a pernicious notion held by many that being a submissive means being a victim or a doormat. The so-called Fifty Shades phenomenon gives this repulsive lie some very long legs, spreading it far and wide and giving it unwarranted credibility. This fallacy must be exposed for what it is. It is a despicable lie that mischaracterizes and tarnishes millions of good people living a healthy and enjoyable lifestyle. At the same time, it undermines the feminist cause, promotes rape culture, and ultimately revictimizes true victims of the very real problems of sexual abuse and violence in this country. — Michael Makai

I have so much respect for the emotionally brave. The ones who put in the emotional work and take the real risks of being vulnerable and removing masks. It's easy to make chitchat, but it's hard to speak about what's really under the surface. It's easy to joke, but difficult to cry. It's easy to numb, but hard to feel.
Ironically the real victims of emotional laziness are the people themselves. They end up choosing their emotional comfort zones over happiness. So in the end, they may not be 'uncomfortable' anymore; but they are also miserable. — Yasmin Mogahed

I'd killed him in the end, but revenge only makes things all better in the movies. In real life, once the villain is dead the trauma lives on inside the victims. — Laurell K. Hamilton

One might go on to say that perhaps justice fails to be done only if the concept we entertain of justice is retributive justice, whose chief goal is to be punitive, so that the wronged party is really the state, something impersonal, which has little consideration for the real victims and almost none for the perpetrator. We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice, which was characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence. Here the central concern is not retribution or punishment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense. — Desmond Tutu

Most codes extend their definitions of treason to acts not really against one's country. They do not distinguish between acts against the government, and acts against the oppressions of the government. The latter are virtues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former. Real treasons are rare; oppressions frequent. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries. — Thomas Jefferson

Who the hell do you think you are?" I snapped.
He grinned and gave me a wink as he said, "Alec Slater, your next - or only - great fuck."
Was he for real?
"You're about to be Alec Slater - murder victim - if you don't shut that hole in your face! — L.A. Casey

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc. — Thomas Szasz

The Resurrection of Jesus is ... a symbol of hope ... I don't see how you can show love ... without being in solidarity with the victims of this world. And if you are in solidarity with the victims, I don't see how you can avoid the cross. The theology of the cross is the theology of love in our real world. — Jon Sobrino

Killers are clever, victims are the people which are scare from the negativity. That's how it goes and it will go. — Deyth Banger

It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment. — Emile Gaboriau

What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight of to a terrible, terrible degree - a devastating degree - is that their victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are perpetrated on them. — Jock Sturges

If out of concern over cloning, the U.S. Congress succeeds in criminalizing embryonic stem-cell research that might bring treatments for Alzheimer's disease or diabetes - and Dr. Fukuyama lent his name to a petition that supported such laws - there would be real victims: present and future sufferers of those diseases. — Gregory Stock

For I'm neither a submitter nor a hating retaliator, I acknowledge the boundaries of my existence; yet, I still care. I care regardless of the way they choose to reduce me to the brand that is the birthmark of the accident of my conception. I care less about what that brand signifies in terms of my character, potential, and intentions. For the harmed I care. For the real victims. It's the most basic of my mandatory civil duties. Only in caring, am I a citizen of the world. — Asaad Almohammad

There are a substantial number of actual victims - of slavery's aftermath, gay bashing, criminal assault, sexual discrimination, physical abuse - whose genuine grievances are trivialized by victim chic. That is the real tragedy. Van — Ken Wilber

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves. — Betty Friedan

The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. — Mark Steyn

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing. — William Lane Craig

The real help victims of injustice need is to get the will, skill and resources to fight back. There may or may not be a hell in afterlife but suffering injustice quietly is a sin, punishment for which is a living hell here and now. — R.N. Prasher

Boredom presents a very real, if insidious peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington post:"Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound ... Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of a map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly. — Jon Krakauer

The practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own. His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity. Iago's self-description, I am not what I am, is correct and the negation of the Divine I am that I am. If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the practical joker is without motive. Yet the professional practical joker is certainly driven, like a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative, a fear of lacking concrete self, of being nobody. — W. H. Auden

The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims. — Rebecca Solnit

The threat of a terrorist attack in Moscow is real enough - a constant beneath the surface. But another, more palpable form of intimidation stalks the city's streets. It targets those from the Caucasus - no longer perpetrators but victims - as well as anyone of non-Slavic descent. This spectre is Russian nationalism, furiously asserting itself. — Harding Luke

The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution - not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions - in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment - often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured - that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of that. My meaning is that I don't want you to be a victim. — Joseph Conrad