14 Quotes Tagged: victim

Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes, But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim.

A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.

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Randolph Bourne … one of the towering public intellectual figures between 1907 and 1918 … wrote a famous essay called ‘The War and the Intellectuals’ … and he says, ‘Idealism should be kept for what is ideal.’ Think about that. Idealism should be kept for what is ideal!

It seems to me that what Randolph Bourne is getting at … is that idealism is not boosterism, just as critique is not castigation. But idealism is a bold and defiant highlighting of hypocrisy …. It is a self-critical and self-correcting procedure.

Hypocrisy can be found in high places of the powerful as well as in places of the powerless. … It cuts both ways. I think this is precisely what Malcolm X had in mind when he provided his technical definition of what a nigger was. Do you recall what he said? He said, ‘a nigger is a victim of American democracy.’ And note the oxymoronic character and self-contradictory character of this formulation.

How could there be a victim of American democracy? Because you point out the hypocrisy and how hypocrisy becomes institutionalized and legalized and you end up with a kind of herrenvolk democracy which, of course, in many ways was the case in the USA until the 1950s.

depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.

"What should we do?", I asked, and I had a pained feeling I thought was the beginning of love.
In those early months we clung to each other with a rather silly desperation, because, in spite of everything my mother or Mrs Jordan could say, there was nothing that really prevented us from seeing each other. With imagined tragedy hovering over us, we became inseparable, two halves creating the whole: yin and yang. I was victim to his hero. I was always in danger and he was always rescuing me. I would fall and he would lift me up. It was exhilarating and draining. The emotional effect of saving and being saved was addicting to both of us. And that, as much as anything we ever did in bed, was how we made love to each other: conjoined where my weaknesses needed protection.

Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not 'dressed,' and long fine hands which were — possibly — not clean.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.