Victim Role Quotes & Sayings

You're too sensitive' victims of sexual abuse are told over and over by those whose reality depends on being insensitive. Most adults who have been in the victim role cringe when anyone tells them they are sensitive. In fact, sensitivity is a lovely trait and one to be cherished in any human being. — Renee Fredrickson

By denying feelings of anger, withdrawing from direct communication, casting themselves in the role of victim, and sabotaging others' success, passive aggressive persons create feelings in others of being on an emotional roller coaster.

...exacting hidden revenge, the passive aggressive individual gets others to act out their hidden anger for them. This ability to control someone else's emotional response makes the passive aggressive person feel powerful. He/she becomes the puppeteer - the master of someone else's universe and the controller of their behavior. — Signe Whitson

As we move away from the old role in which we were helplessly entrapped as a victim, we make friends with the people who affirm us. Their enthusiasm about us mirrors the positive experience we are having. — Maureen Brady

Overly playing the role of the victim can debar you from accepting responsibility for your actions and emotions. — Stephen Richards

Like writing, publishing is not easy. No endeavor worth pursuing is. Discomfort and fear are easy outs - and ultimately dead ends. They are responses to keep us locked in the role of victim. Empowerment is encapsulated in the written word. Writing about trauma is more than simply documenting experience - it's about illuminating life on earth. It's about transforming tragedy into art, and hoping that somehow that piece of art may help someone else who's gone through something unbearable and who doesn't yet see that there is truly a light at the end of the tunnel. . . . It's about transcendence. It's about where we go from here." Tracy Strauss — Rossandra White

Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized. — Barack Obama

A true victim does not relish the role of victim. They do not want to be perceived as victims, and they will do whatever they need to do to heal, adapt and move forward in their lives. — Tara Palmatier

The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. — Byung-Chul Han

Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation. — George K. Simon

Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead.
Probably that goes for anybody in the world. — Chuck Palahniuk

Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds. — Jonathan Coe

I've never really seen myself in the role of the victim. — Oliver Kahn

Go ahead, blame the victim! The villain is my favourite role to play. — Raziel Reid

Sure, genetics do play a role in alcholism. You're more likely to be an alcoholic if one or both of your parents are also alcoholics. But that's just one part of the equation; the other part is your behavior. You can't become an alcoholic if you never take a drink. So if you know you're predisposed to addiction because of your family history, then just don't get started, and you'll never find yourself on that path.
Same with any other type of 'family curse.' If you parents smoke, don't pick up a cigarette. If your parents are obese, work hard to exercise and eat right so you don't follow in their foosteps. But some people find it easier to play the victim. They do whatever bad habits they want to because they think they have a built-in defense - I grew up this way. — Gaby Rodriguez

The sense of "having a goal in your life "will put you in the side of "giving" instead of "getting" ... most of people focus "more" on what they want from their lives and that could lead to thinking in a (victim-of-life) way ... when you start to play the role of a person who's having a meaning and a goal for his/her life, you will get back the self-esteem you deserve. — Susan Jeffers

The conflict between what one is and who one is expected to be touches all of us. And sometimes, rather than reach for what one could be, we choose the comfort of the failed role, preferring to be the victim of circumstance, the person who didn't have a chance. — Merle Shain

Forgiveness tears down the ego's walls of separation and reunites us as one. The anger and fear of the ego's illusion disappear. There's no more "he said, she said." It all just lifts. It feels as though chains have been removed and you've been set free from a lifetime of terror. Why continue rehearsing the role of victim when you could be free and happy? — Gabrielle Bernstein

I believed I was too sensitive and weak. To "prove" I wasn't a victim anymore, I moved closer to painful experiences rather than away from them. Remaining in harm's way and exposing myself to more pain kept me in the victim role rather than moving me out of it. — Christina Enevoldsen

Poor people choose to play the role of the victim. — T. Harv Eker

There was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach; yet, for the same master, he would have gladly gone to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifice of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim. — Robert Leckie

There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one's fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call 'the Affirmative No.' The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim.... Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none. — Jeanne Safer

As long as you think that the cause of your problem is "out there" - as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering - the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you're suffering in paradise. — Byron Katie

The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead. — Chuck Palahniuk

You can't play the role of a victim all your life without becoming one in the end. — Danilo Kis

James Russell offers a timely and compelling blueprint for a realistic transformation of America's energy consumption by refusing to fall victim to conventional thinking. Accessible?pragmatic even?Russell's proposals speak to goals on the immediate horizon and underscore the role that intelligent design can play now in America. On a longer horizon, his analysis points to a range of issues about land use, transportation, and coordination of public and private investments to which the design professions have an enormous contribution to make. Here design and policy find common ground. — Barry Bergdoll

And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society's simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves. — Natascha Kampusch

Blame is the world's greatest excuse. It enables us to remain limited and small without feeling guilty. But there is a cost - the loss of our freedom. Also, the role of victim brings with it a self-perception of weakness, vulnerability, and helplessness, which are the major components of apathy and depression. — David R. Hawkins

Cunt-lapping, mother-fucking, and cock-sucking are words to provoke a sense of outrage. Being forced to play the role of a woman in sexual intercourse is the deepest imaginable humiliation, which is only worsened if the victim finds to his horror that he enjoys it. — Germaine Greer

No one survived on the streets without a protective mask. No one survived naked. You had to have a role. You had to be "thug," "playa," "athlete," "gangsta," or "dope man." Otherwise, there was only one role left to you: "victim. — Jerry Heller

It may be hard to hear, but victim thinking is actually self-centered. If you're stuck in a victim mindset, you feel one down, helpless, and at the mercy of others. From this place you perceive yourself as the target of unfortunate events and other people. You may interpret random events as being about your exceptionally bad luck or as a sign that other people are out to get you. You become "terminally unique" in your outlook and you may even become paranoid. When you take on the role of victim as an identity or a badge of honor, you are actively participating in your victimization and disowning your authentic personal power. "You are only a victim for a nanosecond." - Pia Mellody — Vicki Tidwell Palmer

In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role. — Henry Kissinger

Child, people always look for guilt outside themselves. A person chooses the role of the victim. — Johanna Verweerd

Jesus is great
is there a better role model? No. It's religion, it's the people who get in between
the bureaucracy, you know ... It's the way people abuse Jesus. Was there ever a greater victim of name dropping? — Bill Maher

When I talk about responsibility, I am really talking about having power. Blame is about giving away one's power. Responsibility gives us the power to make changes in our lives. If we play the victim role, then we are using our personal power to be helpless. If we decide to accept responsibility, then we don't waste time blaming somebody or something out there. Some people feel guilty for creating illness, or poverty, or problems. They choose to interpret responsibility as guilt. (Some members of the media like to refer to it as New Age Guilt.) These people feel guilty because they believe that they have failed in some way. — Louise L. Hay

Oh, of course, it was a sad role, the lover no longer loving. But once the perfunctory sympathy was given him the heart went outfully to oneself, the real victim, the unloved. — Dawn Powell

The chains that keep you bound to the past are not the actions of another person. They are your own anger, stubbornness, lack of compassion, jealousy and blaming others for your choices. It is not other people that keep you trapped; it is the entitled role of victim that you enjoy wearing. There is a familiarness to pain that you enjoy because you get a payoff from it. When you figure out what that payoff is then you will finally be on the road to freedom. — Shannon L. Alder

For most, not knowing how to say no is where their lives decline into a thicket of stress and unhappiness. These individuals are easy to spot, as they constantly take on the role of victim to the world's desires. — Brendon Burchard

You'll never reach the top (you won't even get out of the basement) if all you ever do is take on the role of victim. Forget about blaming other people for your failures and shortcomings. — Joe Girard

The role of benefactor is worse than thankless, it's the role of a victim, Doctor, a sacrificial victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on the altar steps of their outraged, outrageous egos! — Tennessee Williams

Don't play the role of victim AGAIN, just to massage your bullies ego
2015 — J. Yates

Chapter 4,'Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief', uses Zizek's (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterise these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organised abuse and women's and children's accounts of sexual abuse more generally. — Michael Salter

I've often wanted to play the victim, or somebody who makes terrible choices. I would love to play the alcoholic mother who horribly lets down her children. That's a great morally imperiled role. — Lucy Lawless

I've been on both sides: the victim and the villain. I was the victimised model, and everything from my weight to my fertility was held up for discussion. And then I was the person that could garner some kind of positive outcome, by taking on the role of vice chairman of the British Fashion Council and becoming an activist of body image. — Erin O'Connor

Blame and victim thinking are so ingrained into the fabric of our society it's hard to find a role model anywhere who simply practices personal accountability in all things. — John G. Miller

That was years ago. I've learned my lessons well and played my role. No longer willing to be a victim, today I'm insidious. — Aleatha Romig