Quotes & Sayings About Victimhood

As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought. — Tammy Bruce

I want those in what I call the regressive left who are reading this exchange to understand that the first stage in the empowerment of any minority community is the liberation of reformist voices within that community so that its members can take responsibility for themselves and overcome the first hurdle to genuine empowerment: the victimhood mentality. This is what the American civil rights movement achieved, by shifting the debate. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders took responsibility for their own communities and acted in a positive and empowering way, instead of constantly playing the victim card or rioting in the streets. Perpetuating this groupthink mind-set is both extremely dangerous and in fact disempowering. — Sam Harris

The world needs people who have survived mistakes, tragedies, and trials to help the rest of us through. Where would we be if Victor Frankl had never experienced what he did during the war? He wouldn't have used his experiences to benefit millions of people around the world.
The world needs you to let go of self-pity and shame regarding your life experiences, too. The world needs you to use the things you have learned for good. Stop letting your past mistakes define you and affect your value. Let go of separation and victimhood and find meaning in what you have been through. — Kimberly Giles

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination. — Bell Hooks

He knew how much pride his people took him being forever misunderstood. — Davis Bunn

When your victimhood is your empowerment, recovery is the enemy, and working on 'individual change' becomes counterproductive, even dangerous to your identity. — Tammy Bruce

Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget. — Steven Pinker

You cannot be happy if your primary identity is that of a victim, even if you really are one. — Dennis Prager

They moved me and scared me. I replayed the tapes and nailed the source of my fear. The women sounded smug. They were entrenched and content in their victimhood. — James Ellroy

What is the ROI (return on investment) of your suffering? — Lisa Cypers Kamen

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. — Timothy Snyder

As Pope Benedict XVI said in his address to the United Nations in April 2008, the language of rights is borrowed from the great Christian tradition, but if you cut off those Christian roots, you get all kinds of abuses, each claiming the postmodern high ground of victimhood but only succeeding in debasing the coinage of rights itself. — N. T. Wright

Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims. — Julian Assange

If I know something, I am not a victim. Victims don't know the meaning of their suffering. I am an enemy or a collaborator, not a victim. — Rachel Klein

At Home in the World is the story of a young woman, raised in some difficult circumstances, and how she survives. It tells a story of redemption, not victimhood. — Joyce Maynard

People having victimhood attract imperious and authoritative individuals in their life — Sunday Adelaja

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear. It was a hectic bazaar, like many other public institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu's death was not a profit-generating enterprise. — Katherine Boo

The only reason pain exists is because we let it feed on us and that gives it the power to continue existing (I.R.V) — Reshma Valliappan

I can either be a victim - or a winner. Fuck victimhood. I don't wear it well; it clashes with my wardrobe. I'm ready. Only one of us is getting out alive. It's going to be me. — Karen Marie Moning

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain "wound identified" (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to "redeem the world," as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others. — Richard Rohr

When I talk of forgiveness I mean the belief that you can come out the other side a better person. A better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood, making you almost dependent on the perpetrator. If you can find it in yourself to forgive then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on, and you can even help the perpetrator to become a better person too — Desmond Tutu

Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that "While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages." Liberals - even upper-income liberals - are a third less likely to say this. — Arthur C. Brooks

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. — Robert O. Paxton

If forgiving depended on the culprit owning up, then the victim would always be at the mercy of the perpetrator. The victim would be bound in the shackles of victimhood. — Desmond Tutu

You can't stand in gratitude if you're stuck in victimhood. — Robin Sharma

National politics and elections are dominated by emotions, by lack of self-confidence, by fear of the other, by insecurity, by infection of the body politic by the virus of victimhood. — Tariq Ramadan

In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. — Timothy Snyder

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

This is the culture of the micro-aggression, where people literally seek out opportunities to be offended....Victim status is so desirable that it's constantly faked or exaggerated, and claims that one is not a victim are met with indignation. — David French

A thief is one who insists on sharing his victimhood. — Criss Jami

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. — Heather MacDonald

The most dangerous identity is that of victim. Once we see ourselves as victims, we can clearly identify a enemy. Steeped in our own victimhood, we no longer feel bound by moral considerations in becoming perpetrators. — Julie Mertus

Having problems doesn't make you noble or virtuous, it makes you human. Nobility and virtue comes from the way that you handle your problems and either learn to move past them or live with them if out of your control. — Oli Anderson

She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those details, were her weaponry of choice against the many difficulties that she had to face. New York was a bitter place for women of her class and color in those days, but she did not reciprocate that bitterness. She rose above the meanness that surrounded her. She punched holes in that meanness with her cleverness and wit and with her eye for the preposterous. She laughed a lot. She loved her lamb chops and her baked potato. In the details, she transcended. — Jonathan Kozol

No one is ever a victim, although your conquerors would have you believe in your own victimhood. How else could theu conquer you? — Barbara Marciniak

The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like. — Robert Bly

People are like that ... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.' And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety
it stands alongside our sameness. — John Irving

Nothing enables people to do evil as much as does a sense of victimhood — Dennis Prager

A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions. — Serge Schmemann

The Joy of Victimhood There are some clear rules about happiness. One is that you cannot be happy if your primary identity is that of a victim, even if you really are one. There are a number of reasons: People who regard themselves as victims do not see themselves as in control of their lives. Whatever happens in their lives happens to them, not by them. People who primarily regard themselves as victims see the world as unfair to them in particular. Just as the young student who always sees himself as "being picked on" is an unhappy soul, so is the person who carries that attitude into adulthood. People who regard themselves primarily as victims are angry people, and an angry disposition renders happiness impossible. People who have chosen to regard themselves as victims cannot allow themselves to enjoy life, because enjoying life would challenge their perception of themselves as victims. — Dennis Prager

Resentments and grudges are two of the main culprits that perpetuate cycles of self-abuse and victimhood. Stowed away inside you like parasites, they deplete you of your God-given life force and separate you from your inherent worth, your joy, and the love in your heart. — Debbie Ford

Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage before outright aggression. — Stefan Molyneux

To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:
Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past ...
Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions ...
Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood ...
Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable. — Gordon MacKenzie

I'm not leaving the plane that way," I said to myself. That's when I discovered the power of choice - a third place that is neither "have to" or "want to." That discovery freed me to move forward to make two other choices: I'm not going to be kicked out of this plane; and If I'm going to leave this plane, it will be under my own power. I'm going to maximize my chances of a safe exit. The change in my feelings at that moment was quite dramatic. Stress was replaced with purposeful action; a sense of victimhood was transformed into empowerment. There was no hesitation, no ambivalence. — Neil A. Fiore

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems. The Gospel exposes those lies in every culture: The American addiction to oil, war, and empire; the church's addiction to its own absolute exceptionalism; the poor person's addiction to powerlessness and victimhood; the white person's addiction to superiority; the wealthy person's addiction to entitlement. — Richard Rohr

I wear makeup and I don dramatic attire because I like control. I'm not interested in controlling others but I'm invested in strict self-governance. This is why I don't do many face-to-face interviews. I don't like being caught off-guard. It all goes back to that attempt to create order amidst disorder. One of the most frightening things about losing your mind is that you feel like your body, your brain, every part of your essence is being invaded. There is such a palpable helplessness to that narrative and I hate the sense of victimhood that it implies. Certainly, this is how I felt during my moments of psychological disquiet. I felt like my personhood was under attack. Performativity is important to me because I'm the teller of my own stories. I have been performing these multiple roles for so long that they have bled into my identity. I have become the man that I always wanted to be. — Diriye Osman

If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Some people stand and move as if they have no right to the space they occupy. They wonder why others often fail to treat them with respect
not realizing that they have signalled others that it is not necessary to treat them with respect. — Nathaniel Branden

The soul journey inward is when we are invited to cast aside beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve us and release all tendencies toward victimhood, stagnation, passivity, and self-destruction that keep us disempowered or cause frustration and suffering to ourselves and others. This is no easy task, and one in which we can use all the divine support possible to help us on our way. It is a time to pray. — Sonia Choquette

I'm a great supporter of women who take risks and don't make victimhood into an art. It's not good for women, and it's not good for men. Too many men put all their emotional eggs in one basket - a woman's basket. — Warren Farrell

One nurse thought I was "brave." I think she was talking about my steely-eyed, grin-and-bear-it kind of attitude. There were no tears, no complaints from me - a total lack of affect. In a victim, it is courage and thus admirable; in a predator, it is a lack of humanity and instills fear. — M.E. Thomas

Forgiveness is the key to breaking the cycle of karma and reincarnation. Forgiveness doesn't mean: "What you did was okay." It simply means, "I'm no longer willing to carry the heavy toxic burdens of anger, resentment, and victimhood in my soul." You can work on healing, uplifting, and changing situations from a place of forgiveness, instead of from a place of resentment. Forgive yourself and everyone, and you are free! — Doreen Virtue

Stop bitching about everybody else and what they've done to you and start cleaning up your own shit yourself.

The only person who can make you a victim is you. — Max Patrick

What is the return on investment of being wedded to your suffering? What do you receive from stewing in victim consciousness? Righteous indignation or an excuse not to change? — Lisa Cypers Kamen

I believe that the fragile-flower, idea-intolerant society of victimhood that is being cultivated in many colleges today is really bad. — Gene Weingarten

But in a world where victimhood has become status, souls go unexamined for hardness. — John Ortberg

Victimhood gives us great moral superiority and entitles us to unquestioning sympathy while exempting us from examining any single one of our actions. A victim is utterly devoid of responsibility or blame. This of course leaves us vulnerable as we will carry on engaging in precisely the behaviour which provoked an unacceptable response. — Belinda Brown

A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you. — Joseph Sobran

I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties
feminism and multi-culturalism
come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence. — Theodore Dalrymple

They both possessed a victimhood that had been conferred because they'd both been guilty of being female in a world where some men believed they deserved never to feel powerless. — Val McDermid

Lies and victimhood make evil possible — Dennis Prager

You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus. — Thomas Sowell

Victimhood and a 'can't do' spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression. — Cal Thomas

The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint. — George Will

Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil. — Jonathan Haidt

There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass. — Paul Rusesabagina

But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity. — Dean Koontz

Because modern society has almost completely eliminated trauma and violence from everyday life, anyone who does suffer those things is deemed to be extraordinarily unfortunate. This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery. — Sebastian Junger

The feminism of equality, of toughness, of anti-discrimination, has been overwhelmed by one of victimhood and demands for special treatment....At a certain point, when we demand an equal ratio of men to women in certain fields, what we're criticizing is not "the system," but the choices that women themselves are making.....let's keep our eye on the question of equal opportunity and stop obsessing about equal outcomes, lest we find ourselves trying to cure society, not of sexism, but of free choice. — Elizabeth Wasserman

Why has America's fringe left been making common cause with the Taliban, whose views on such matters as women's rights and separation of church and state are appallingly retrograde by anyone's standards? One reason may be that the Taliban seem to have mastered the language of victimhood, sounding like denizens of some college ethnic-studies department. — James Taranto

Writing journal is for those people who find no interest in living a life of victimhood and limited personal freedom. — Deepak Burfiwala

Americans who do not see themselves as victims - of an 'unfair' or 'racist' or 'misogynist' society - are more likely to vote Republican. On the other hand, Americans who see themselves as victims of American society are likely to vote Democrat. Therefore, the Democratic Party and its supportive media cultivate victimhood among almost all Americans who are not white and male. — Dennis Prager

If you are taught bitterness and anger, then you will believe you are a victim. You will feel aggrieved and the twin brother of aggrievment is entitlement. So now you think you are owed something and you don't have to work for it and now you're on a really bad road to nowhere because there are people who will play to that sense of victimhood, aggreivement and entitlement, and you still won't have a job. — Condoleezza Rice

The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It's when mercy is least expected that it's most potent - strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration. — Bryan Stevenson

There is a fetishization of victimization in our culture. And I just am not interested in victimhood. — Alan Ball

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims. — Gloria Steinem

When you inhabit any of these three roles, you're reacting to fear of victimhood, loss of control, or loss of purpose. You're always looking outside yourself, to the people and circumstances of life, for a sense of safety, security, and sanity. — David Emerald Womeldorff

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness. — Phyllis Schlafly

I recall vividly the night before one of my own early surgeries, an eight-hour affair that would alter my body permanently. I was twenty-seven and unmarried at the time. Late in the evening a pleasant elderly woman, a technical aide, had come to my hospital room to shave my abdomen in preparation for the procedure. As she went about this humble task with great skill, she had asked me about the next day's surgery. Filled with resentment, self-pity, and a sense of victimhood, I told her what was planned and burst into tears. She had seemed quite surprised. "How would YOU feel if they were going to do this to YOU tomorrow?" I asked her angrily. she had taken my question literally and had thought it over. Then, patting me gently, she had said, "If I needed it to live, I would be glad for the help." Her answer had changed everything. — Rachel Naomi Remen

...there is a particular focus of the problem faced only by men. It arises from our culture providing no room for a man as victim. — Mike Lew

We must stop this incessant victimhood mentality.
Somebody else will not fix things.
Somebody else will not make me healthy.
Somebody else will not make me happy.
These things are my responsibility.
Not the neighbor's,
not the government's,
not the church or the civic club. — Joel Salatin

Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute. — Stephen A. Diamond

People can become so blinded by their own perceived victimhood that they make victims of everyone around them. — Richard Paul Evans

I will not be a victim. I will not think like a victim. I am going to avenge all those little girls. I am going to win. — Carolyn Lee Adams

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic. — Christopher Hitchens

All victimhood is ego and is not spiritually inspired — Frank Healy