Stigmatizing Quotes & Sayings

In effect, vice turns common sense upside-down, and he who admits himself to be vicious abides by stigmatizing terms of horror. — Georges Bataille

Of course the welfare of our children is a legitimate state interest. However, limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples fails to further this interest. Instead, needlessly stigmatizing and humiliating children who are being raised by the loving couples targeted by Virginia's Marriage Laws betrays that interest. E. S.-T. [the 15-year-old daughter of two of the plaintiffs], like the thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples, is needlessly deprived of the protection, the stability, the recognition and the legitimacy that marriage conveys ... — Arenda L. Wright Allen

I take opioids to treat chronic pain. Stigmatizing them will harm me. — Sonya Huber

The human being is a skin-covered petrie dish. — Bruce H. Lipton

I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose. Sometimes the simple act of humanizing problems sheds an important light on them, a light that often goes out the minute a stigmatizing label is applied. — Brene Brown

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death. — Lewis Mumford

But since those Romans were in an earthly city, and had before them, as the end of all the offices undertaken in its behalf, its safety, and a kingdom, not in heaven, but in earth - not in the sphere of eternal life, but in the sphere of demise and succession, where the dead are succeeded by the dying - what else but glory should they love, by which they wished even after death to live in the mouths of their admirers? — Augustine Of Hippo

Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances. "That boundary is very populous. The most crowded boundary is the boundary with normal."
"Why?" I asked.
"There's a societal push for conformity in all ways," he said. "There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. 'Previously I was laughed at, I was picked on, no one liked me, but now I can talk to fellow bipolar sufferers on the Internet and no longer feel alone.'" He paused. "In the old days some of them may have been given a more stigmatizing label like conduct disorder or personality disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. Childhood bipolar takes the edge of guilt away from parents that maybe they created an oppositional child. — Jon Ronson

Traveling in other countries is especially fun because others often attribute your differences to the less-stigmatizing idea that you're like this only because you're a foreigner. — Michael John Carley

A bad composition carries its own punishment - contempt and ridicule; a good one excites envy and entails upon its author a thousand mortifications; he finds himself assailed by partial and ill-humored criticism; one man finds fault with the plan, another with the style, a third with the precept which strives to inculcate; and they who cannot succeed in finding fault with the book, employ themselves in stigmatizing its author: they maliciously rake out from obscurity every little circumstance which may throw ridicule upon his private character or conduct and aim at wounding the man since they cannot hurt the writer. — Matthew Gregory Lewis

(In 2006, social psychologist Bella DePaulo, PhD, coined the word singlism to mean "the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single.") — Kate Bolick

Sometimes it all becomes too much. Your body and mind will just give way. Part of you may want to blissfully fade into nothing, but you never do. After a while all the memories and emotions make you shut down but never fully disappear - it's safer for you this way, to be excluded. It's a time to be alone, to heal, and to find yourself. It doesn't mean you've given up or stopped trying; it just means you know what's best for you.
Breathing is medicine. I forgot how to breathe, but I'm learning all over again. — Mandi Lynn

I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions. — Lord Byron

Michelle Alexander's brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow. — Lani Guinier

self-stigma is not a person's fault; nor is it a part of the person's illness!
If the public did not hold negative and stigmatizing attitudes in the first place, these would never have become internalized, causing people the painful and disabling experience of self-stigma. — Patrick W. Corrigan

to avoid describing any behavior that might be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing" to poor people is to "render liberal arguments ineffective" because the American public wants answers to questions about that behavior. There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of all sin. — Matthew Desmond

Stop thirsting for things that are bitter,
Go crazy here, here in these arms that are still
Wrapped around the absent shape of you,
Go crazy with me, thrash about in our bed
And weep and wail and call me by her name,
At least have the courage to let our hearts break together. — Patricia Smith