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

“Many today have difficulty understanding how the Puritans could execute people based on something like spectral evidence. Yet modern moral panics are more like witch hunts than one might suppose.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“A social environment that is conducive to false accusations could lead us to people being falsely accused of falsely accusing others.”
― 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

“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

“Love without strength leads to victimhood, and strength without love leads to tyranny.”
― Traver Boehm, Man Uncivilized

“Magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offender are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors are all integral to the microaggression program but possibly harmful to mental health.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Microaggression complaints arise from a culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display a high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to authorities and other third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Campus victimhood culture is so conducive to accusations on behalf of victim groups that we should not be surprised if many turn out to be false.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The prominence of victimhood culture in higher education, especially at elite institutions, indicates that victimhood culture is concentrated among the relatively affluent and successful members of the upper middle class.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The concept of political correctness is now used in a variety of ways, but must often it refers to the rules about what words and ideas are forbidden for being offensive, particularly if they are offensive to women and minorities.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Competitive victimhood can both encourage and limit the spread of victimhood culture. It may lead the clash between dignity and victimhood to transform into a clash between competing victimization narratives, or it may cause the victimhood revolution to devour its own, eventually burning itself out.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Sociology and social justice each have potential only when operating within their limits. The promise that a science of social life could aid social justice efforts was reasonable, but when social justice becomes an ideology unmoored from empirical reality, it needs no science.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“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

“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

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