Victimhood Quotes

“Attitude Is Everything

We live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations.

The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances?

When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.”
― Sandra Lee Dennis

“Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.”
― Julian Assange

“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, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

“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

“Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.”
― Gloria Steinem, The Trouble With Rich Women

“Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape.
The shaming is in being asked to stand judgment.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“Under a man's hands--crush of his body--exigent breath--I remembered how to perform. Yes when I meant no. Lust or satisfaction or pleasure. Gratitude, as required, knowing that, naked beneath a man's disappointment, there lay this possibility of violence, as pungent and close-fitting as skin. One pound of flesh, paid freely, was preferable to a bloodier extraction. My past roles of sex kitten and hard bitch, blushing penitent, coy exotic, tease: I'd learned, long before this day, that I could play anything to avoid the role of victim.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Bad social science might result from systematic bias, but to embrace blame analysis as a way of evaluating theory or to transform sociology into advocacy for the oppressed is to do something else entirely.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Much scholarship is nothing more than political activism, and much teaching nothing more than indoctrination.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“One tweet includes a photo of her at fourteen, skinny and smiling through braces in her field hockey uniform, the text screaming, THIS IS HOW OLD TAYLOR BIRCH WAS WHEN JACOB STRANE ASSAULTED HER. I try to imagine the same line paired with the Polaroids Strane took of me at fifteen, my heavy-lidded eyes and swollen lips, or with the photos I took of myself at seventeen, standing before a backdrop of birch trees, lifting my skirt as I stared at the camera, looking like a Lolita and knowing exactly what I wanted, what I was. I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Psychology is an invitation out of victimhood, not into it.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“While suffering is universal, victimhood is optional.”
― Brian Reese

“In a prior age, the human experience was understood as the temporal embodiment of desire, delight, fear, grief, faith, love, hope, hatred, horror, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, loyalty, fidelity, sublimity, desperation, chagrin, anger, fury, wrath, distress, discomposure, shame, dignity, indignity, glory, contempt, slight, heartbreak, fondness, tenderness, adoration, infatuation, compassion, goodwill, worship, sorrow, anguish, despair, woe, dejection, despondency, duty, angst, reverence, respect, esteem, exaltation, melancholy, disquiet, weariness, felicity, glee, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, euphoria, exhilaration, rhapsody, brotherhood, contemplation, mediation, surrender, fancy, impulse, yearning, thirst, hankering, pining, enthusiasm, need, obligation, fancy, mystery, helplessness, luck, recklessness, boldness, fearlessness, wildness, sorrow, regret, gloom, heavyheartedness, and dreaminess and ten thousand others. These are the sentiments which great art compels us to feel. But mediocre art truncates the human experience. It prunes and lops off all the diversity and richness of life and leaves us with little more than lust, amusement, self-fulfillment, and the resentment which comes from our endless search for the power that now attends victimhood.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Ignore content that tries to persuade you that you are not in control of most of the outcomes in your life. Avoid the victim mindset because you are the alchemist and the magician. Cry, rest, and reset if you need to. But afterward, get back up and take back your power.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Victimhood culture makes it hard to avoid wrongdoing. If you have any kind of privilege, the social world is full of peril; you always risk giving offense. Engage in small talk and you might be guilty of a microaggression. Cook a new dish or adopt a new hairstyle and you might be guilty of cultural appropiation. Teach about something unpleasant and you might be guilty of triggering someone. Express your religions or political beliefs and you might be guilty of violence. Whatever you do, you must do it in a way that is supportive of victims and reproachful of their oppressors.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The logic of victimhood culture means no speech is clearly protected.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“It is only when faced with deep differences, with cultural miscommunication and moral conflict, that we become aware that our way of seeing the world is not universally shared.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Injustice, like pain, is a birthright we all receive with admission into this life: a firm, inescapable reality.”
― Shawn Davis, The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions

“In the future the question will not be “what is your chosen profession?” But rather “what is your chosen oppression?”
― Dean Cavanagh

“Thus, unless we actively seek out this information, it can remain below our radar. Or perhaps we conceal the truth because we want to protect our children from the harsh realities of gender-based violence. One could argue that protecting children in this way as a means of instilling in them a robust sense of security is an important aspect of early childhood development. But at some point, sticking to this story becomes counterproductive, for as long as we are taught that the world is a benign place for women, when harm comes to us the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that it is our fault.”
― Karyn L. Freedman, One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery

“Rare is the Stalin-like individual, who lacks empathy and who seems to take pleasure in inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted to others; common is the -virtuous citizen acting in the name of righteous causes-.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“It is all too easy, in the atmosphere of intellectual fog that pervades Liberal and Humanist circles today, to allow sympathy for an unfortunate person to pass over into receptivity to his ideas. The Nihilist, to be sure, is in some sense "sick," and his sickness is a testimony to the sickness of an age whose best--as well as worst--elements turn to Nihilism; but sickness is not cured, nor even properly diagnosed by "sympathy." In any case there is no such thing as an entirely "innocent victim.”
― Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

“Just as the symbol of Christ's crucifix encapsulates the triumph of the victim and has been exploited historically as a means to exert power over others, the rainbow Pride flag now serves a similar function.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Over time, the loudest people become the easiest to ignore.”
― Criss Jami

“Everyone is you pushed out. Once you understand this, you’ll never resort to victimhood. Also, the way that people treat you will transform significantly.”
― Robin S. Baker

“One thing that differentiates actual victimhood from a victim mentality is the presence of Envy. The former requires outer work while the latter, inner work. Resist becoming too resentful in life to learn and discern excellence.”
― Criss Jami

“He has a way of drawing His loves back to Himself. A psyche separated from the peace (and the freedom) of Christ is liable to entangle itself in all sorts of folly and vanity, or confused witchcraft. On the one side it will preach, 'Empowerment!' But on the other it will scream, 'Oppression!' Yes, you now have the power to be oppressed: because as long as you look to be a victim, you will find yourself to be a victim.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“By succumbing to external conditioning and looking outside ourselves for answers, thus denying the power of our imagination and ignoring the only viable path forward into the future (that of internal transformation), we’re bound to just keep pouring gasoline on a world already on fire.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“The biggest appeasers are often the most foreign to those they appease because there is a sort of fear and reverence for the unknown. A brother doesn't hesitate to roast a brother when he needs to be roasted; a friend isn't afraid to criticize a friend when it's meant to be constructive. On the contrary, a society full of people so easily offended by one another is a society intimidated, fearful, and divided, and the end result is the masses trampling on trust and on the concept of telling the truth. It is at the heart of it all, at the root, where many are called 'victims' not so much because of convictions, but because of a lack of connection; where everything's an offense not so much because of conscience, but because between them there is this vast distance; where pain stood not so much because they could bear only the good, but because they lacked brotherhood. For perfect love casts out fear.”
― Criss Jami

“All too often, students from nonmaterially privileged backgrounds assume a position of passivity—they be have as victims, as though they can only be acted upon against their will. Ultimately, they end up feeling they can only reject or accept the norms imposed upon them. This either/or often sets them up for disappointment and failure.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom