abuse Quotes

“Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!”

“Soldiers and civilians, intensely propagandized by their government, usually carried their own caustic prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish, subhuman beasts or fearsome ‘Anglo-Saxon devils.’ This racism, and the hatred and fear it fomented served as an accelerant for the abuse of Allied prisoners.”

″‘I will fly to those royal birds,’ he exclaimed, ‘and they will kill me, because I am so ugly, and dare to approach them; but it does not matter: better be killed by them than pecked by the ducks, beaten by the hens, pushed about by the maiden who feeds the poultry, or starved with hunger in the winter.‘”

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”

“The ducks pecked him, the chickens beat him, and the girl who fed the poultry kicked him with her feet. So at last he ran away, frightening the little birds in the hedge as he flew over the palings.”

“If this had happened two summers ago, Eleanor would have run and banged on the door herself. She would have yelled at Richie to stop. She would have called 911 at the very, very least. But now that seemed like something a child would do, or a fool.”

“As Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘Man is the cruelest animal.’ This is a fact of life and it is not changed by all the abuse and harassment policies in all of Silicon Valley. Progressives will never understand this.

“‘Everything I have ever done I’ve done from a place of love. If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.’”

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

“I wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone in this whole world. I wouldn’t hurt them physically or emotionally, how then can people so consistently do it to me? Even my parents treat me like I’m stupid and inferior and ever short. I guess I’ll never measure up to anyone’s expectations. I surely don’t measure up to what I’d like to be.”

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

“Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.”

“Ivan Ilych never abused his power; he tried on the contrary to soften its expression, but the consciousness of it and the possibility of softening its effect, supplied the chief interest and attraction of his office.”

“My third comfort Starr’d most unluckily, is from my breast, The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, Haled out to murder: myself on every post Proclaimed a strumpet: with immodest hatred The child-bed privilege denied, which ‘longs To women of all fashion; lastly, hurried Here to this place, i’ the open air, before I have got strength of limit.”

“When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.”

“I meant to say I am sorry that Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, ‘I’m sorry your figurines broke, Mama.’”

“Every time he came back, apologetic, contrite, he’d start off being real nice. But he was as predictable as rain. Nobody knew when he’d go off, but at some point everybody knew he would. Again, and again, and again.”

“That’s what seventeen-year-old Sky realizes after she meets Dean Holder. A guy with a reputation that rivals her own and an uncanny ability to invoke feelings in her she’s never had before.”

″‘You would have thought more of me if I’d let that dog wander around till Judd found it again, kick the daylights out of ‘im?’ I ask. ‘I want you to do what’s right.’ ‘What’s right?’ For once in my eleven years, I think I have my dad stumped.”

“Mum had said that if he made himself invisible people would like him and he wanted that very much.”

″‘I must be good,’ he whispered urgently. ‘I must be good,’ and he rubbed a sore spot on his arm. He was such a bad boy. Mum said she was kinder to him than most mothers. She only gave him soft beatings.”

“Tom was angry. ‘While you’re in my house,’ he said in a choked voice, ‘you’ll live by my rules. I ent ever hit a child...‘”

“I knew no one could help me. Not my teachers, my so-called brothers or even Father. I was on my own, and every night I prayed to God that I could be strong both in body and soul. In the darkness of the garage, I laid on the wooden cot and shivered until I fell into a restless sleep.”

“Clara never spoke to her husband again.”

“I don’t have a dad. I lived with my mom when I was little and we got on great but then she got this Monster Gorilla Boyfriend and I hated him and he hated me back and beat me up and so I had to be taken away to a children’s home.”

“that is what abuse is: knowing you are going to get salt but still hoping for sugar for nineteen years.”

“My love was a privilege that you abused. I have withdrawn that privilege. You are out of my heart.”

“People who were abused as children tend to get angry and strike out at the world. People who were neglected tend to feel defeated and withdraw from the world. People who were not given guidance tend to lack confidence and self-reliance. Each pathway leads to different forms of self-defeat.”

“People who live with substance abusers know that refusing to cooperate with the addiction can trigger an explosive outburst or a childish accusation.”

“Because emotional abuse is impossible to prove, we often have an incredibly difficult time describing or putting into words what exactly has happened to us that is so bad. We know things were not or are not normal, but we don’t know why. Emotional abuse moves quickly. Just as we’re about to put our finger on it, it seems to slip away. Without a clear set of concrete, provable terms, many of us question if our abuse or neglect was real. Did it really happen? Or are we just making it up? We reason that if we were truly abused, our abuse should be easy to explain.”

“He was nine years old now, going on ten, and officially a dog-boy, but in actual fact just something of a no account, to be kicked by anyone who felt like kicking, and plenty of people did.”

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality, and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married again.

″‘But then,’ I continued, holding myself ready to flee, ‘if poor Catherine had trusted you, and assumed the ridiculous, contemptible, degrading title of Mrs. Heathcliff, she would soon have presented a similar picture! She wouldn’t have borne your abominable behaviour quietly: her detestation and disgust must have found voice.’