Victim Thinking Quotes & Sayings

To stop being a victim, you have to stop thinking like a victim. — Asma Naqi

Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking. — Orson Scott Card

Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret. — Noam Chomsky

You can never be free from limitation until you are willing to recognize that you and you alone are responsible for what you are. After you have passed infancy you are not a victim of anything but your own thinking. — Margery Wilson

Viciousness is part of the world we live in, some of us choose to ignore it with the rationalisation of wanting only positivity to flow our way. How selfish we have become! That the pain of others has become a hindrance to the fulfilment of our positive selves. — Aysha Taryam

The student who deceives himself into thinking that he is giving his life like an ascetic in the spirit of sacrifice for art, is the victim of a deplorable species of egotism. — Alma Gluck

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

It is ironic, in the manner of a dystopian nightmare, that an advanced capitalist empire which is founded on genocide and slavery, which still functions as the global police, which has an armed population, which routinely violates international human rights, which has the largest known military industrial complex in the world, which is the world's largest producer of pornography, has also produced a saccharine ideology in which 'positive thinking' functions as a form of psychological gentrification. And it is not insignificant that the neoliberal lie that one is 110% responsible for one's life - first powerfully encapsulated by the 'alternative' conservative thinker Louise Hay, and more recently echoed by Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now (1997/2005) - is directed at women. Today, gendered victim-blaming has become a form of upwardly mobile common sense 'wisdom'. Now victimblaming is expressed by voices that sound soothing, wise, calm, above all, loving. — Abigail Bray

Do you think in many ways, sir, you're the victim of circumstance now? — Peter Jennings

Do not be victim of life-negative religions. Be respectful to life, love and beauty. — Amit Ray

That's my advice to people. You can't get hung up on thinking, "Am I the victim in this situation?" No, I'm in charge of it. — Mindy Kaling

Depending on their fondest memory of you, most people hold on so tightly to their fondest memory they don't usually let you be anything greater than that. And that's one of the things I think I allowed myself to be a victim of earlier in my career. What I learned as I got older is I decide. I decide what it's like for me, not other people. You can be whatever you'd like to be. You just have to choose it. — Ricky Williams

I didn't want to be a victim of my own message [in Trust film]. I didn't want to take advantage of a 14-year-old actor. I didn't want there to be any nudity, or any real overt violence. I think it's more terrifying that there is no violence, in that moment. There's control and there's power, but there's no violence. — David Schwimmer

Another example was relentlessly expressed during Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency, and especially since her defeat: the assertion that she was the victim of misogynistic comments and that she lost because she was a woman. None of it is true. But it keeps feminists thinking of women as victims - and people who think of themselves as victims are rendered weak....Modern feminists are afraid of life. They are afraid of differences of opinion, and especially afraid of men.....Feminists are outraged and unduly stressed by much of life itself. — Dennis Prager

And Grandma spooned in some beans. "We need one of them psychics," Grandma said. "I saw on television where you can call them up, and they know everything. They find dead people all the time. I saw a couple of them on a talk show, and they were saying how they help the police with these serial murder cases. I was watching that show, and I was thinking that if I was a serial murderer I'd chop the bodies up in little pieces so those psychics wouldn't have such an easy job of it. Or maybe I'd drain all the blood out of the body and collect it in a big bucket. Then I'd bury a chicken, and I'd take the victim's blood and make a trail to the chicken. Then the psychic wouldn't know what to make of it when the police dug up a chicken." Grandma helped herself to the gravy boat and poured gravy over her pot roast. "Do you think that'd work?" Everyone but Grandma paused with forks in midair. — Janet Evanovich

Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can you tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything. — Betsy Lerner

Let me not be so vain to think that I'm the sole author of my victories and a victim of my defeats. — Ze Frank

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

Think what it must be like for a victim about to die under torture. Think how the torture must be multiplied in his flesh and soul with the splendour that surrounds him! And how his agony must become more atrocious, more desperately atrocious, dearest heart!"
"I was thinking about love," I replied reproachfully. "And you continuously talk about torture!"
"Why not - since it's the same thing! — Octave Mirbeau

Stop and think a little: Are you the victim of the system? — Bob Marley

I can't get myself to say what happened next. I cannot cope with even thinking about this let alone living with it."
"It is so degrading and I try to forget, it hurts so much because she is my mother."
- Graham talks about being sexually abused by his mother — Carolyn Ainscough

Narcissists will never tell you the truth. They live with the fear of abandonment and can't deal with facing their own shame. Therefore, they will twist the truth, downplay their behavior, blame others and say what ever it takes to remain the victim. They are master manipulators and conartists that don't believe you are smart enough to figure out the depth of their disloyalty. Their needs will always be more important than telling you any truth that isn't in their favor.. — Shannon L. Alder

Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood ... — J.G. Ballard

[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

There are some great positive quotes out there that I can't quite share as I wonder how a victim in a war torn country could be expected to see from their perspective? — Jay Woodman

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

I think very frequently, musicians become a victim of every song they sing. I like all kinds of recreation. It's aggressive. I want to be part of everything. — David Lee Roth

Oceans need more attention because climate change IS an ocean issue. Our oceans will be the first victim, and sea life will suffer dramatically. Detailed proof is hard in ocean science, but I think we're already seeing big ocean changes caused by climate change, such as starvation of whales, seabirds, and other animals off the coast US west coast. — Mark Powell

Part of knowing how to think is knowing how the laws of nature shape the world around us. Without that knowledge, without that capacity to think, you can easily become a victim of people who seek to take advantage of you. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The main problem of a person with victim mentality is that he is incapable of thinking over his life and consequently cannot reach his goals — Sunday Adelaja

I believe Williams was the only one of us, except perhaps Ronald Tolkien, from whom Lewis learnt any of his thinking. It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one's own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love. This was a power...he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim — Jocelyn Gibb

In 1848, the 39-year-old Lincoln offered some sage advice to his law partner, William H. Herndon, who had complained that he and other young Whigs were being discriminated against by older Whigs. In denying the allegation, Lincoln urged him to avoid thinking of himself as a victim: "The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about, and see if this feeling has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it."1 — Michael Burlingame

In the past, I was a perpetual victim; how I was doing in any given moment depended on what happened to me. Today I do my best to avoid this kind of 'victim thinking.' Instead, how I am doing is determined by how I respond to what happens to me. — Jenni Schaefer

YOu enjoy it, didn't you?
YOu like it, didn't you?
You are now smiling are you?
(You are asking for what... So far I will say "Nothing, nothing --- Just my mistake...")
...
I know what you are thinking you want I to be your next victim! ( DON"T YA? :D) — Deyth Banger

[on the Victim Mentality] It takes a great level of intelligence to maintain a thinking process as stupid as this. Because it is such a great undertaking, we take pride in it. It highlights our intellect. Too bad it also highlights our lack of wisdom. For all our twisting, wringing, stretching, and stuffing, we only contort ourselves. — David G. Allen

You can be a victim of a crime and not exercise great judgment. And when women have been sexually assaulted, they feel like they have to have been perfect in order to have anybody believe them. They think nobody will believe them unless a stranger jumped out from behind a bush with a knife - not that they got too drunk and that a guy they thought they knew, you know, took advantage of them in a physical, assaultive way. — Claire McCaskill

The way you talk about yourself and your life-your story-has a great deal to do with what shows up in your day-to-day experience. Your thoughts create filters through which you view your life. If you think of yourself as a Victim, you filter all that happens to you through the lens of DDT, and you find plenty of evidence to support that viewpoint. That's why the orientation you adopt is so important: it exerts a powerful influence on your life direction. — David Emerald Womeldorff

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

As he mused about these things, he realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in quest of his treasure. — Paulo Coelho

People with victim mentality do not have the habit of thinking on their own or thinking in general — Sunday Adelaja

Maybe you receive pain selfishly - thinking only of yourself. The cycle of pain wounds every participant; both victim and aggressor. — Bryant McGill

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

Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You were a target that is now no longer being hit. — Thomas Sheridan

I think handbags, not so much clothes anymore, but I think you can tell a fashion victim by their handbag. — Joanna Lumley

Many hours of law-school argumentation have been spent on what to do with a man who stabs a corpse thinking it is his sleeping enemy, or whether it makes sense to charge a shooter with attempted murder if the nearest hospital is five minutes away and his victim survives, but to charge him with murder if the nearest hospital is fifteen minutes away and the victim succumbs. — Steven Pinker

I think it's almost necessary for most people to have the freedom to pull back, and then re-enter at an adult level, where they are neither playing the victim nor creating victims, but just participating in calm, adult behavior. Because an awful lot of churches just aren't there at adult Christianity, this seems to be the norm anymore. — Richard Rohr

There's so much there to cultivate an opportunity to change the mindset of how players think, in terms of not lending their power over to just anyone. I've been a victim of that, and it's difficult to rebound from. — Eddie George

Such a pity, really; the prey falling for the predator. The victim in love with the killer ... A mere mortal girl thinking a demon was capable of love. — Charlotte Munro

This was the thing that terrified me the most - more than the victim, more than the demon, more even than the dark thoughts. It was the fact that the dark thoughts were mine. That I couldn't separate myself from evil, because most of the evil in my life came from inside my own head.
How long could I live like this? I was trying to be two people - a killer on the inside, and a normal person on the outside. I made such a show of being a good, quiet kid, who never caused problem and never got into trouble, but now the monster was out, and I was actually using him - I was actively seeking out another killer. I'd given in. I was trying to be John and Mr. Monster at the same time.
Was I fooling myself, thinking that I could split my life like this? Was it possible to be two people, one good and one bad, or was I forced to be a mix of both - a good person forever tainted by evil? — Dan Wells

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

Thinking scientifically requires the ability to reason abstractly, which itself is at the foundation of all morality. Consider the mental rotation required to implement the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This necessitates one to change positions - to become the other - and then to extrapolate what action X would feel like as the receiver instead of the doer (or as the victim instead of the perpetrator). A case can be made that the type of conceptual ratiocination required for both scientific and moral reasoning not only is linked historically and psychologically, but also that it has been improving over time as we become better at nonconcrete, theoretical reflection. — Michael Shermer

You can't think and act like a victim and expect victory. — Bill Bartmann

I am really fascinated by self-sabotage. I think that there's not a person I know who doesn't fall victim to it. It's essential to the human condition, and relatable. — Kit Williamson

I never went into it [the business] thinking 'I'm a female sports reporter'. I just went into it thinking 'I'm a sports reporter'. No chip on the shoulder, no feeling like a victim when you walk in, no feeling entitled when you walk in. You've just got to do your job and work extremely hard. I think it's very basic. There's no magic to it. I think honestly it comes down to how badly do you want it. How hard are you willing to work? — Michele Tafoya

We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil. — Michel Onfray

I choose to surround myself with happy human beings. I went through the angsty period. I think every single person does. I think it's a rite of passage to hate the world and feel like the victim. — Shailene Woodley

I have no physical symptoms, but psychologically there's this burden. I've got to get rid of it somehow. Of course, when I first went back to work I was scared the same thing might happen again. It takes positive thinking to overcome fear, otherwise you'll carry around this victim mentality forever. — Haruki Murakami

Just relax. When I was younger, I made myself the victim of catastrophic thinking. Anything that went wrong was the end of the world. But as I've gotten older, I've learned to stop myself and say, 'Hey babe, calm down. Tomorrow there will be sun.' — Gabourey Sidibe

Growing a pair is a state of mind, an attitude, and a way of thinking. It's about giving up being a victim and taking control of your life at every level. It is the willingness to do the right thing even when everyone else is doing the wrong thing. — Larry Winget

Someone once asked me how I hold my head up so high after all I have been through. I said it's because no matter what, I am a survivor NOT a victim. — Patricia Buckley

A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion - wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P.T. Barnum meant when he said, There's a sucker born every minute'. But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic, however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney. — Carl Sagan

I have truly moved beyond my victimization. I do not think of myself as a victim. I don't think of myself as a survivor. I think of myself as someone who through forgiveness has healed her soul and body and moved on to help other people. — Stephanie Davis

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing I consciously avoid is playing the victim. I think women are portrayed as the victim in so many things, and I really like women with strength - although I feel now I may have gone overboard by playing so many strong, sassy women. — Kristen Bell

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim. — Ayn Rand

Tied to the physical, deaf to the eternal, riveted by my own shortcomings, I was thinking only of what a bad choice I'd made when choosing a partner for a chat. This guy was faking timidity to lure someone over. If I said victim, he was likely to start gnawing my neck. If I said vampire, he would demand proof. I hadn't the fangs enough to back that pretension. — Christine Wicker

You know, many writers really don't like to write. I think this the chief complaint of so many. They hate to write; they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist the victim he is, but they loathe the process of sitting down trying to turn thoughts into reasonable sentences. — Harper Lee

I spend my time on Crimewatch appealing for criminals on the run. Domestic violence is one of the few crimes I can think of where the victim is often forced to go on the run. — Fiona Bruce

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer! — Anne Sexton

There is a belief advanced today, and in some cases by conservative black authors, that poor children and particularly black children should not be allowed to hear too much about these matters. If they learn how much less they are getting than rich children, we are told, this knowledge may induce them to regard themselves as "victims," and such "victim-thinking," it is argued, may then undermine their capacity to profit from whatever opportunities may actually exist. But this is a matter of psychology-or strategy-and not reality. The matter, in any case, is academic since most adolescents in the poorest neighborhoods learn very soon that they are getting less than children in the wealthier school districts. They see suburban schools on television and they see them when they travel for athletic competitions. It is a waste of time to worry whether we should tell them something they could tell to us. About injustice, most poor children in American cannot be fooled. — Jonathan Kozol

He realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in quest of his treasure. "I'm an adventurer, looking for treasure," he said to himself. — Paulo Coelho

I think it is in the interest of the people of [Serbia] that no one, not even the government, can get away with the crime, whoever the victim. — Michael Kirby

Most people focus on forgiving others, thinking there isn't a need for self-forgiveness, particularly if they see themselves as a victim. — Liane Holliday Willey