Quotes about abuse
page 5

“If a girl gets sexual pleasure from riding a horse, does the horse suffer? If not, who cares? If you French kiss your dog and he or she thinks it's great, is it wrong? We believe all exploitation and abuse is wrong. If it isn't exploitation and abuse, it may not be wrong.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

New York Times, 2001 http://www.animalrights.net/quotes.html http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/233771_robert23.html. 2001

Pleasure, Dogs, Girl, Kiss

“Anthropologists have concluded that "child abuse…is virtually unknown" in New Guinea.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: The Emotional Life of Nations (2002), Ch. 7, p. 273.

“Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

A falsified quote invented during the 2010 financial crisis. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Isoc.+7+20&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0144 Isocrates' actual, more nuanced, quote runs as follows: Those who directed the state in the time of Solon and Cleisthenes did not establish a polity which … trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and licence to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser. Areopagiticus, 7.20 (Norlin) Misattributed

Democracy, Freedom

“One minute I'm robbing a dope house. Next minute I'm the youngest heavyweight champion of the world. I'm only 20, 19, with a lot of money. Who am I? What am I? I don't even know who I am. I'm just a dumb child who's being abused and robbed by lawyers. I'm just a dumb pugnacious fool. I'm just a fool who thinks he's someone. Then you tell me I should be responsible.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml;jsessionid=CEDUJVE3P05PLQFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/sport/2002/05/01/sotys02.xml&page=2
On himself

Money, World, Fools, Thinking

“I'm not very different from anyone else who has ever tried to accomplish something with his life. My motivation comes from my personal life, from watching what my mother and father went through when I was growing up, from what we experienced as migrant workers in California. That dream, that vision grew from my own experience with racism, with hope, with a desire to be treated fairly, and to see my people treated as human beings and not as chattel. It grew from anger and rage, emotions I felt 40 years ago when people of my color were denied the right to see a movie or eat at a restaurant in many parts of California. It grew from the frustration and humiliation I felt as a boy who couldn't understand how the growers could abuse and exploit farm workers when there were so many of us and so few of them.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

What the Future Holds (1984)

Life, People, Dreams, Hope

“Society is celebrity-based and we are determined to use [celebrities'] voices to make sure no one forgets there are issues over the use of animals. Celebrities can be great for our cause and can really make people sit up and think for the first time about animal abuse.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

Ingrid Newkirk — taking on the critics http://www.animal-lib.org.au/more_interviews/ingrid/, Animal Liberation NSW. 2003

People, Thinking, Time, Animals

“[on President Barack Obama's performance in the 2012 Presidential Debate of Oct 3, 2012] Can I state the obvious here, since we all have theories? The obvious is he he didn't bring his game because he doesn't have a game. They have now blamed his performance on everything from strategic — he's a unifier — that's belied by his campaign, calling Mitt Romney everything from from a liar to a tax thief to a felon to a murderer to a dog abuser to a misogynist.”

Mary Matalin (1953) American political consultant

This is one of the most negative campaigns in history... ABC This Week (October 7, 2012) http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/week-1007-robert-gibbs-ed-gillespie-mitt-romney-17416989?tab=9482930&section=1206874&playlist=17417528

Dogs, History, Game

“Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger. Because there can be no such thing as compulsory compassion or vicarious compassion, therefore it is a humbugging abuse of language, intended to deceive, to talk about a 'compassionate Government' or a 'compassionate party'—or even a 'compassionate society', unless one simply means by that a society which happens to contain a lot of compassionate individuals. Nor let anyone protest: 'Oh, but when I vote for a party which will "make provision on an unprecedented scale for those in need of help", it means I too shall have to pay my whack and so I am being compassionate after all.'”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Nonsense! The purpose of your vote is not to make yourself subscribe—that you can freely do at any time—but to compel others.
Speech to the Harborough Division Conservative Association Gala, Leicester (27 September 1969), from Still to Decide (Elliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 22-23
1960s

Time, Help

“There is no question of ever accepting Nazi representatives in the Austrian cabinet. An absolute abyss separates Austria from Nazism. We do not like arbitrary power, we want law to rule our freedom. We reject uniformity and centralization.... Christendom is anchored in our very soil, and we know but one God: and that is not the State, or the Nation, or that elusive thing, Race. Our children are God’s children, not to be abused by the State. We abhor terror; Austria has always been a humanitarian state. As a people, we are tolerant by predisposition. Any change now, in our "status quo", could only be for the worse.”

Kurt Schuschnigg (1897–1977) Chancellor of Austria

"Morning Telegraph" of London (January 5, 1938), reprinted in "Let the Record Speak", Dorothy Thompson, Boston: MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1939) p. 135

God, Children, People, Law

“There is a natural right that says that when the state asks you for a third of what you earned through back-breaking work, this seems to you a reasonable demand and you give in. If the state asks you for more, or much more, then it is a clear abuse against you and then you try to find evasive ways to make you feel coherent to your intimate sense of morality and it doesn't make you feel ethically guilty.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

Addressing the commander of the special italian police corp, Guardia di Finanza, whose job is to fight financial fraud and tax evasion in November of 2003, quoted in la Repubblica (17 febbraio 2004) http://www.repubblica.it/2004/b/sezioni/politica/cdlverifica2/candida/candida.html 2003

Way, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“Unjust attacks on public men do them more good than unmerited praise. They are hurt less by undeserved censure than by undeserved commendation. Abuse helps; often praise hurts.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Diary (14 July 1889)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

Men, Help, Hurt

“It is clear that God is saying, 'I gave man dominion over the earth, but he lost it. Now I desire mature sons and daughters who will in My name exercise dominion over the earth and subdue Satan, the unruly, the rebellious. Take back My world from those who would loot it and abuse it. Rule as I would rule.”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

The Secret Kingdom

God, Secret, World, Exercises

“I promise you, there are people in America whose only problem with the Taliban is that they did it for the wrong god. Whether it's incest, rape, terrorism or Nazism, it's all the same thing—accumulating and abusing power.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

New York Post on April 11, 2004.

God, People, Problem

“[the authors in Justice Belied made a] compelling case that this system is not only flawed but produces serious and systematic injustice. One major theme pressed in a number of chapters is that the international criminal justice system (ICJS) that has emerged in the age of tribunals and “humanitarian intervention” has replaced a real, if imperfect, system of international justice with one that misuses forms of justice to allow dominant powers to attack lesser countries without legal impediment. No tribunals have been established for Israel’s actions in Palestine or Kagame’s mass killings in the DRC. Numerous authors in Justice Belied stress the remarkable fact of the ICC’s [International Criminal Court] exclusive focus on Africans, with not a single case of charges brought against non-Africans. And within Africa itself the selectivity is notorious – U. S. clients Kagame and Museveni are exempt; U. S. targets Kenyatta, Taylor, and Gadaffi are charged. […] The system has worked poorly in service to justice, as the authors point out, but U. S. policy has had larger geopolitical and economic aims, and underwriting Kagame’s terror in Rwanda and the DRC and directing the ICC toward selected African targets while ignoring others served those aims. Many of the statutes and much political rhetoric accompanying the new ICJS proclaimed the aim of bringing peace and reconciliation. But this was blatant hypocrisy as the exclusion of aggression as a crime, the selectivity of application, the frequency of applied victor’s justice, and the manifold abuses of the judicial processes have made for war, hatred, and exacerbated conflict. The authors of Justice Belied do a remarkable job of spelling out these sorry conditions and calling for a dismantling of the new ICJS and return to the UN Charter and nation-based attention to dealing with injustice.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, review of Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice, Z Magazine, January 2015.
2010s

War, Age, Peace, Justice

“At the beginning [of The X-Files] the pay disparity was massive. But that happens all the time in Hollywood. It's, 'Do this for me, I'll get you a job.' All the stuff in the papers today about people in entertainment who have abused their position… it's built into our society. It's easy to miss and it's easy to get used to it. There are things that are intolerable in today's world, in terms of the perception of women. Whether they're vamps or vixens, the expectation that, if a woman is wearing a short skirt, she's 'asking for it.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

About the wage gap in Hollywood and sexism — Red Online "Life Is Short, Follow your Heart" http://www.redonline.co.uk/red-women/interviews/interview-gillian-anderson-talks-jamie-dornan-pictures (November 10, 2014) 2010s

Women, People, World, Time

“Present party designations have become empty of all contents…Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Letter to Sir Francis Webster, president of the Montrose Burghs Liberal Association, quoted in 'Lord Morley On Modern Politics', The Times (11 May 1923), p. 12.

Money, Problem, Learning

“Nature awareness, ecological worries and reactions to animal abuse are not signs of mankind at last getting conscious of its impact on the rest of the planet, but of the necessity for capital to think globally, and to take all past and present into account, from Maya temples to whales and genes. Everything it dominates has to be controlled and classified in order to be managed. What is marketable must be protected. Capital owns the world and no owner can afford to be too careless about his possessions.”

Gilles Dauvé (1947) French writer

"Letter on Animal Liberation" (1999)

World, Nature, Thinking, Past

“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"Poetry and Grammar"
Lectures in America (1935)

Love

“I do not tolerate the so-called "cultic" (or ego-made, and ego-reinforcing) approach to Me. I do not tolerate the seeking ego's "cult" of the "man in the middle". I am not a self-deluded ego-man—making much of himself, and looking to include everyone-and-everything around himself for the sake of social and political power. To be the "man in the middle" is to be in a Man-made trap, an absurd mummery of "cultic" devices that enshrines and perpetuates the ego-"I" in one and all. Therefore, I do not make or tolerate the religion-making "cult" of ego-Man. I do not tolerate the inevitable abuses of religion, of Spirituality, of Truth Itself, and of My own Person (even in bodily human Form) that are made (in endless blows and mockeries) by ego-based mankind when the Great Esoteric Truth of devotion to the Adept-Realizer is not rightly understood and rightly practiced.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/first_word/complete_text.html

Truth, Religion, Personality

“To some this may appear to be a small matter, but to Mr. Harry Hook, it is very important. He is a street trader in the Barnsley Market. He has been trading there for some six years without any complaint being made against him; but, nevertheless, he has now been banned from trading in the market for life. All because of a trifling incident. On Wednesday, October 16, 1974, the market was closed at 5:30. So were all the lavatories, or 'toilets' as they are now called. They were locked up. Three quarters of an hour later, at 6:20, Harry Hook had an urgent call of nature. He wanted to relieve himself. He went into a side street near the market and there made water, or 'urinated' as it is now said. No one was about except one or two employees of the council, who were cleaning up. They rebuked him. He said: 'I can do it here if I like'. They reported him to a security officer who came up. The security officer reprimanded Harry Hook. We are not told the words used by the security officer. I expect they were in language which street traders understand. Harry Hook made an appropriate reply. Again, we are not told the actual words, but it is not difficult to guess. I expect it was an emphatic version of 'You be off'. At any rate, the security officer described them as words of abuse. Touchstone would say that the security officer gave the 'reproof valiant' and Harry Hook gave the 'counter-check quarrelsome'; As You Like It, Act V, Scene IV. On Thursday morning the security officer reported the incident. The market manager thought it was a serious matter. So he saw Mr. Hook the next day, Friday, October 18. Mr. Hook admitted it and said he was sorry for what had happened. The market manager was not satisfied to leave it there. He reported the incident to the chairman of the amenity services committee of the Council. He says that the chairman agreed that 'staff should be protected from such abuse.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

That very day the market manager wrote a letter to Mr. Hook, banning him from trading in the market.
Ex Parte Hook [1976] 1 WLR 1052 at 1055.
Judgments

Life, Understanding, Nature, Water

“Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to J.H. Tiffany (31 March 1819)
1810s

“Abusive' (or 'hostile,' which in this context I take to mean the same thing) does not seem to me a very clear standard - and I do not think clarity is at all increased by adding the adverb objectively or by appealing to a reasonable person's notion of what the vague word means.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 U.S. 17 http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1168.ZC.html (1993) (concurring). 1990s

Hostility, Thinking, Personality

“The author of Amelia, the most singular genius which their island ever produced, whose works it has long been the fashion to abuse in public and to read in secret.”

George Borrow book The Bible in Spain

The Bible in Spain (1843), ch. 1.

Secret, Fashion, Reading

“Our political life favors the extremes of speech; the man who is gifted in the arts of abuse is bound to be a notable, if not always a great figure.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section II, p 110 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Life, Art

“Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. x

Women, Freedom, Dependency, Personality

“Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine." I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher’s myth.”

Gilbert Ryle book The Concept of Mind

Source: The Concept of Mind (1949), Ch. I: Descartes' Myth, (2) The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine

Life, Hope, Falseness

“We hold that the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong, that in the exercise thereof people have an inviolable right to express their unbridled thoughts on all topics and personalities, being liable only for the abuse of that right.”

William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) American newspaper publisher

Platform, Independent League; N.Y. Journal (February 1, 1924)your mom stinks

People, World, Exercises, Personality

“Recently we heard that a prominent parliamentarian converted government assets to his personal use. Very soon, we will hear of some prominent politicians evading tax deliberately. Very soon we will hear of people abusing their travel entitlements. We extend zero-tolerance to these kind of people and some years ago, we know that the former Prime Minister converted government funds to improve his own personal standing by renovating and upgrading his personal house. The member for Labasa Open went on a fishing trip at government expense … This is fraud. I do not know want you want to call it, but it is fraud, using taxpayers' money for personal use.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Parliamentary speech, 23 November 2005 (excerpts)

Money, People, Travel, Fraud

“Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 149.

Time

“Young girls sometimes make use of the expression: “Reading books to read one’s self.” They prefer a book that presents some resemblance to their own circumstances and experiences. It is true that we can never understand except through ourselves. Yet, when we want to understand a book, it should not be our aim to discover ourselves in that book, but to grasp clearly the meaning which its author has sought to convey through the characters presented in it. We reach through the book to the soul that created it. And when we have learned as much as this of the author, we often wish to read more of his works. We suspect that there is some connection running through the different things he has written and by reading his works consecutively we arrive at a better understanding of him and them. Take, for instance, Henrik Ibsen’s tragedy, “Ghosts.” This earnest and profound play was at first almost unanimously denounced as an immoral publication. Ibsen’s next work, “An Enemy of the People,” describes, as is well known the ill-treatment received by a doctor in a little seaside town when he points out the fact that the baths for which the town is noted are contaminated. The town does not want such a report spread; it is not willing to incur the necessary expensive reparation, but elects instead to abuse the doctor, treating him as if he and not the water were the contaminating element. The play was an answer to the reception given to “Ghosts,” and when we perceive this fact we read it in a new light. We ought, then, preferably to read so as to comprehend the connection between and author’s books. We ought to read, too, so as to grasp the connection between an author’s own books and those of other writers who have influenced him, or on whom he himself exerts an influence. Pause a moment over “An Enemy of the People,” and recollect the stress laid in that play upon the majority who as the majority are almost always in the wrong, against the emancipated individual, in the right; recollect the concluding reply about that strength that comes from standing alone. If the reader, struck by the force and singularity of these thoughts, were to trace whether they had previously been enunciated in Scandinavian books, he would find them expressed with quite fundamental energy throughout the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, and he would discern a connection between Norwegian and Danish literature, and observe how an influence from one country was asserting itself in the other. Thus, by careful reading, we reach through a book to the man behind it, to the great intellectual cohesion in which he stands, and to the influence which he in his turn exerts.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: On Reading: An Essay (1906), pp. 40-43

People, Books, Soul, Girl

“Then there are those proverbial “bird brains” of the barnyard, chickens, surely the most maligned and abused animal on the face of the earth, and—just as surely—among the brightest, most social birds we'll find anywhere. … Chickens not only are capable of learning, they are also capable of teaching one another. It turns out that chickens are not as dumb as popular mythology makes them out to be.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 6

Bird, Learning, Animals

“In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw – which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them.”

Nigel Rees (1944) British writer and broadcaster

Sayings of the Century (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. iv.

People, Law, Way

“As to abuse, I thrive on it. Abuse, hearty abuse, is a tonic to all save men of indifferent health.”

Norman Douglas (1868–1952) British writer

Some Limericks (1928).

Men, Health, Indifference

“It is impossible to concede that, by the words "freedom of the press," the framers of the amendment intended to adopt merely the narrow view then reflected by the law of England that such freedom consisted only in immunity from previous censorship, for this abuse had then permanently disappeared from English practice. It is equally impossible to believe that it was not intended to bring within the reach of these words such modes of restraint as were embodied in the two forms of taxation already described.”

George Sutherland (1862–1942) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, United States Senator, member of the United States House of Re…

Grosjean v. American Press Co. (1936)

Law, Freedom

“Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

“I wish I had the answer to that, because if I knew how to create an instantly popular character like that, I would do more of them. It’s weird to me because, on one hand, she’s appealing, but you look at her and she’s not exactly a good role model for girls. And in the past, we have definitely explored some of the darker edges of her story. She was kind of in an on-going abusive relationship with the Joker. So it is weird but maybe a lot of her appeal, at least recently, is because they have separated her from the Joker in comics. She’s become her own standalone character and definitely not in an abusive relationship with the Joker anymore. I guess that is somewhat empowering and people can relate to it. But truthfully, she was a really, really popular character even before all this. I think part of it is probably, to pat my own back, design. She was a really simple basic character in red and black, cute face, cute figure, one and done. So that definitely has to be a part of it.”

Bruce Timm (1961) Animator

People, Girl, Thinking, Past

“Fitz-Roy's temper was a most unfortunate one. It was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame. He was very kind to me, but was a man very difficult to live with on the intimate terms which necessarily followed from our messing by ourselves in the same cabin. We had several quarrels; for instance, early in the voyage at Bahia, in Brazil, he defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they were happy, and whether they wished to be free, and all answered "No." I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answer of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything? This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word we could not live any longer together. I thought that I should have been compelled to leave the ship; but as soon as the news spread, which it did quickly, as the captain sent for the first lieutenant to assuage his anger by abusing me, I was deeply gratified by receiving an invitation from all the gun-room officers to mess with them. But after a few hours Fitz-Roy showed his usual magnanimity by sending an officer to me with an apology and a request that I would continue to live with him.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter II: "Autobiography", pages 60-61 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=78&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Happiness, Anger

“In the post-Vietnam War era the need for Communist abuses has been no less pressing than before. More facts have come to light on the scope of U. S. violence in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the extent of which U. S. officials lied to the public with regard to their programs and methods, and the brazenness with which these officials defied treaty obligations and international law. Much as the government and the media tried to isolate the scoundrelism of Watergate from the much more profound immorality of the “secret” devastation of Cambodia, the linkage between the two could not be entirely concealed and therefore tended to discredit still further the campaign to bring “freedom” to South Vietnam. Counterrevolution, torture and official murder in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and other U. S. satellites was also reaching new peaks. Thus, if Cambodian terror did not exist, the Western propaganda systems would have had to invent it, and in certain respects it did […].”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 19.

War, Secret, Law, Freedom

“Voluptuous habits speedily bind all the powers of the soul in loathsome vassalage, and exclude every thought except such as relate to the beastly pleasures of which it is the slave. Distracted by cravings as inexorable as they are base, and in their vileness perpetually reproduced, — tantalized by the impure fountains of a diseased imagination, and oppressed with its own effeminacy, — the mind loses its vigor and its productiveness. Every faculty rapidly deteriorates and decays; memory becomes extinguished, inanity destroys resolution, and the heart is as cold and callous as a cinder extinct. It ceases to love, to sympathize, and diffuse the delicious tears that sanctify friendship's shrine. The whole countenance assumes an expression of obdurateness and repugnance. The features, marked with premature decay, proclaim that the source of gentle sentiments, pure emotions, and innocent joys, is exhausted, like a limpid fountain invaded by the scoria and flame of a volcano. All the elements of life seem to have retreated into their abused organs only to perish there. Even the organs themselves are withered, and worse than dead; their infirmities, maladies, sufferings, rush in a multitude upon the degraded victim, and overwhelm him in awful retribution.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 354.

Love, Life, Friendship, Pleasure

“From the vulgar bourgeois standpoint the terms dictatorship and democracy are mutually exclusive. Failing to understand the theory of class struggle, and accustomed to seeing in the political arena the petty squabbling of the various bourgeois circles and coteries, the bourgeois conceives dictatorship to mean the annulment of all the liberties and guarantees of democracy, tyranny of every kind, and every sort of abuse of power in the personal interests of a dictator.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 31.
Collected Works

Democracy, Understanding, Personality

“The media should objectively inform about abuses associated with loan agreements when they occur, particularly instances of evictions, destruction of the environment, child labour and corruption.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the adverse impact of World Bank policies on human rights and the realisation of a democratic and equitable international order
2017, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

“I'm against abstinence programs because I really consider "abstinence only" child abuse.”

Joycelyn Elders (1933) American pediatrician, public health administrator, and former Surgeon General of the United States

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, "Abstinence" http://www.sho.com/site/video/player.do?video=/134/2006/abstinence&seriesid=134 [4.10], 5 June 2006 Abstinence education

“Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. "I have never belonged to this race," said Rimbaud.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"On Shooting at Elephants" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001211/leonard, The Nation (27 November 2000)

Love, War, World, Dreams

“It is a good life, if I watch myself. Kind of like when I used to diet, but now instead of limiting calories, I will not allow negative self-talk. I cut out insults like I cut out carbs and it is hard as hell because I crave self-abuse like hot, fresh sourdough bread, but you know you have to be nice to you if you are going to live together.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Weblog

Life, Hell

“Fitness is defined differently by everyone, but for me, the most important thing is being healthy. As tennis players, what we do is not the healthiest thing. We almost abuse our bodies.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

In Zee News: I quit singles to prolong my career, says Sania http://zeenews.india.com/sports/tennis/i-quit-singles-to-prolong-my-career-says-sania_757389.html, 2 March 2013

“There is no city, country-side, or castle, nor any place in all Romagna, nor officer or minister of the duke's, who does not know of these abuses; and, amongst others, the famine of wheat occasioned by the traffic which he held against our express prohibition, sending out such quantities as would abundantly have sufficed for the people and the army.”

Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) Duke of Romagna and former Catholic cardinal

Cesare's publication on the corrupt practices of Ramiro de Lorqua (December, 1502) as quoted by Rafael Sabatini, 'The Life of Cesare Borgia', Chapter XVI: Ramiro De Lorqua

People, Country

“I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Crime Times, Nov./Dec. 1988

People, Books, World, Fear

“You don't wage civil war in kid gloves. The Spanish bishops know it so well that they have been obliged to refer to 'regrettable excesses' and 'inevitable abuses'. They seem to think that war is like Shrove Tuesday, that it's a jolly respite, as it were, from social morality, and that men can give themselves up to being cruel just as gay sparks at carnival-time indulge in bottom-pinching! Once the illuminations go out, we must welcome the dear lad home with a smile that's both knowing and fatherly. 'Don't worry, my dear boy. We can none of us resist a little fun sometimes. Think no more about it.”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

But, Your Excellencies, this is something more than a little fun!
Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.147

Men, War, Smile, Home

“Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse.”

Sonia Sotomayor (1954) U.S. Supreme Court Justice

United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945, 956 (2012) (concurring).

Freedom

“Whether in a South African coal mine, on an Alaskan fishing boat, or in the American military, men's protective instinct toward women, and women's protective instinct toward themselves (and children) keeps men more disposable than women. Here's an example of the dynamic at work in the military. At the military's SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) schools, concern about the well-being of women was so prevalent among male students that trainers now work to desensitize men to sexual assault and other abuse of women lest their sensitivity be used against them in war. We think of women in the military as being safer in part because they are still prohibited from the most dangerous assignments. But this prohibition is just a reflection of the traditional male's instinct to protect women.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 33.

Women, Men, War, Children

“I’m a member of the Pascua Yaqui Nation and as an indigenous person, the fur trade represents so much more to me than just animal abuse. It represents cultural genocide. They were the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the “new world.” They were the ones who introduced disease. They were the ones who introduced alcoholism. They were the ones who introduced gunpowder and many, many things that led to our decimation.”

Rod Coronado (1966) Native American eco-anarchist and animal rights activist

A Voice for Liberation http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/msr/coronado.html

Alcohol, World, Disease, Animals

“I have several times found some people say that there were abusing drawings of Islam or Prophet Muhammad and people get angry and hurt inside. I was just thinking whether we also do insult Prophet Muhammad? In our behaviors and our practices do we insult Islam or not? I mean, we got hurt by those people who draw abusing drawings or making abusing movies of Prophet Muhammad, So what have we done? We also insult Prophet Muhammad! At the end, what we have introduced about our religion is what made people attack us and insult us.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi during celebrating the night of El-Kadr on 25 July 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6d_ln9MQHk. 2014

People, Religion, Behavior, Thinking

“Jews abused and attacked on the streets of European cities… Muslim mobs attacking synagogues… Nobody gives a damn about Jews and they never have, which is why the Holocaust was allowed to happen in the first place.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"A New Kind of Hate" (27 January 2015) https://youtube.com/watch/?v=YQjTLGgQV2w 2015

“We believe it is imperative that farm laborers, among the most abused and neglected of all American workers, be included at last among those who benefit from the Fair Labor Standards Act. We want coverage extended to include those millions in retail trades, laundries, hospitals and nursing homes, restaurants, hotels, small logging operations and cotton gins who still work for starvation wages.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Statement on minimum wage legislation (18 March 1966)], as quoted in Now Is the Time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Labor in the South: The Case for a Coalition (January 1986)
1960s

Home

“To the existence of banks of discount for cash… there can be no objection, because there can be no danger of abuse, and they are a convenience both to merchants and individuals. I think they should even be encouraged, by allowing them a larger than legal interest on short discounts, and tapering thence, in proportion as the term of discount is lengthened, down to legal interest on those of a year or more. Even banks of deposit, where cash should be lodged, and a paper acknowledgment taken out as its representative, entitled to a return of the cash on demand, would be convenient for remittances, travelling persons, etc. But, liable as its cash would be to be pilfered and robbed, and its paper to be fraudulently re-issued, or issued without deposit, it would require skilful and strict regulation.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

ME 13:431
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

Travel, Thinking, Personality

“The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists—and all those who abuse public credulity—is founded on errors in this type of calculation.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin, Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (Imprimerie royale, 1784), trans. Stephen Jay Gould, "The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs", Bully for Brontosaurus (W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 195

People, Art, Error, Thinking

“Quite in vain did several lawyers point out to him that, if justice really existed, there would be no need for law and lawmakers, and thus one of mankind’s noblest conceptions would be obliterated, and an entire occupational group would be thrown out of work. For it is the essence of the law, they told him, that abuses and outrages should exist, since these discrepancies served as proof and validation of the necessity of law, and of justice itself.”

Robert Sheckley book Mindswap

Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 6 (pp. 28-29)

Justice, Law

“If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted then they are for civill Obedience.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 2, p. 8
Leviathan (1651)

Men, People, Fear, Dreams

“The one reason that I could not ignore, the one reason that grew deep inside me till it consumed me with guilt, was the realisation that I was abusing my faith for a mere political project. After learning in prison that Islamism was not the religion of Islam, but rather a political ideology dressed up as Islam, I no longer felt guilty simply for criticising a political system inspired by modern European constructs, while justified by seventh-century norms.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 210

Faith, Religion, Learning

“The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox but the ox becomes a lion. So the immigrants of all races and nations become Americans, and it is a disgrace to our institutions and a shame to our policy to abuse them or drive them away.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

The Red Man, Volume X, No. 6 (July-August 1890) The origin remains unclear. Gen. R. H. Pratt, "The Fathers of the Republic on Indian Transformation and Redemption" https://books.google.com/books?id=WMARAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=%22schools+are+the+stomachs+of+the+country%22&source=bl&ots=Jcl8GbwmVC&sig=R-frEgg-6ZUZrx_UqCh1cqH4yb8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPkOyV7a_PAhVC5iYKHajpD1sQ6AEINTAE#v=onepage&q=%22schools%20are%20the%20stomachs%20of%20the%20country%22&f=false, The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, Vol. 2, No.2 (April–June 1914), p. 129 cites "the columns of a little newspaper printed at one of the Indian schools during and prior to 1885". The Educational Weekly https://books.google.com/books?id=nWY0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA519&lpg=PA519&dq=%22schools+are+the+stomachs+of+the+country%22&source=bl&ots=hTHXz7Q2AZ&sig=K_egMYGg8RNaVLKxEPiYt3w25mM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPkOyV7a_PAhVC5iYKHajpD1sQ6AEISzAJ#v=onepage&q=%22schools%20are%20the%20stomachs%20of%20the%20country%22&f=false, Vol. 11, No. 222 (1 December 1881), p. 187 cites "a lecture referring to the maltreatment of the Chinese". Other Sourced

People, School, Country

“No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.”

Paul Gallico (1897–1976) American writer and journalist

Quoted in The New York Times, January 14, 1962 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A03E4D8153DEE32A25757C1A9679C946391D6CF

Understanding, Study

“I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.”

J.B. Priestley book English Journey

English Journey, 1934. Reprinted in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton Writing Englishness: An Introductory Sourcebook,Routledge, 2003 (p. 26).

Love

“It is problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, “Well, I wouldn’t have done that”—because if you weren’t exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you don’t fit in his shoes. Even if you would like to imagine what it’s like to be him, you won’t be very good at it.”

David Eagleman (1971) neuroscientist and author

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

Shoe, Imagination

“Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (the whole peninsula of Indochina) present a puzzling picture, enigmatic to most foreigners and especially so to Americans. The very name Vietnam evokes deep emotions and bitter memories in our countrymen. But the tendency to blame Vietnam for our domestic ills has no foundation in fact. The problems of urban decay, racial disharmony, drug abuse, and all the rest were bound to plague us, whether or not we became involved in Vietnam. Indeed, one can argue that in the 1950s, well before we became heavily involved in Vietnam, a sense of national direction and purpose appeared to be lacking in the United States. This book looks at the Vietnam War from the perspective of a senior military professional who held important positions of responsibility during the conflict. Among other things, I will seek to bring out the lessons we have learned or should have learned from the war, and their implications for the future. The severe impact of the war on our armed forces and its almost disastrous effect on the U. S. Army will receive special treatment.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. vii-viii

War, Books, Problem, Sense

“Once upon a very long time ago, in the time of Glaux, there was an order of knightly owls, from a kingdom called Ga'Hoole, who would rise up each night and perform noble deeds. They spoke no words but true ones, their purpose was to right all wrongs, to make strong the weak, mend the broken, vanquish the proud, and make powerless those who abused the frail. With hearts sublime they would take flight…”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Noctus, Kludd's father, telling a legend of Ga'Hoole, repeated throughout the series; Chapter One: "A Nest Remembered", p. 14
The Capture (2003)

Strong, Time, Heart, Night

“(Eating meat) is really on the same moral level as child abuse. It’s the same thing. Animals are like children, they look to us for protection. We should protect them. I really feel quite smug about mad cow disease and foot and mouth and so forth, and I just think ‘Well, what do you expect? People have been saying it for years.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From the TV documentary The Importance of Being Morrissey (2003)
In interviews etc., About vegetarianism and animals

Children, People, Disease, Feeling

“You will have a great deal of unreserved discourse with Mrs. K., I dare say, upon this subject, as well as upon many other of our family matters. Abuse everybody but me.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1807-01-07) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Family

“I've come out here tonight to challenge you… challenge you, the WWE Universe, into seeing things my way and to learn how to just say "no." See, because the people who cheer for Jeff Hardy are just slaves to the vices associated with his (with quote fingers) "living in the moment." I feel bad for you, I really do. You walk around almost blind and you wear your prescriptions proudly on your sleeves like they were badges of honor. What was it the doctor told you? 'Just take one… every four hours,' right? Aside from myself, there's not a person in this arena who hasn't abused prescription medication or taken a recreational drug. And I know, trust me, it's hard being straight-edge, it's hard to live a straight-edge lifestyle. It's extremely difficult to be me, but what concerns me now is that none of you realize how much more difficult it is to live the life… that you all live. I'm positive nobody in here takes into account the long-term consequences of alcohol on your liver. (Smattering of cheers from audience) See, and you cheer that. That's nothing to cheer. You drink because it's fun, right? (Audience cheers a little louder) Eventually, it's not gonna be fun anymore when it spirals out of control and its no longer… it's no longer fun. Sooner or later, you're just drinking to feel normal. And then there's the smokers. You know, I don't know what's more disgusting–is watching a smoker pollute his/her lungs with over 4,000 foreign chemicals, or having to listen to the smoker convince themselves that they can quit whenever they want to. It's… it's hard to quit, I know, it takes a very strong person to quit, but an even stronger person never would've started smoking in the first place. (Audience boos and chants "Hardy") I didn't want to come out here and be the bearer of bad news, but let's face facts: chances are pretty slim that any of you here will ever get the monkey off your back. You'll never be able to pry the cigarette from your lips, or find the self-control to pour your drink from your glass, or the self-respect to take the pill out of your mouth. See, it starts, and it can't happen without learning how to say "no" to temptation, and that's why I'm out here. I'm out here to challenge you before it's too late. Please, learn how to say "no" to temptation, learn how to say "no" to your vices, learn how to control yourself.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

July 24, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Life, People, Alcohol, Way

“A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On John Dryden (1828)

Art

“Every institution goes through three stages — utility, privilege, and abuse.”

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian

As quoted in Culture and Progress (1930) by Wilson Dallam Wallis.

“You will find an allusion to some mysterious cause for a phenomenon in Stocks. It is surmised that the deferred debt is to be taken up at the next session, and some anticipated provision made for it. This may either be an invention of those who wish to sell, or it may be a reality imparted in confidence to the purchasers or smelt out by their sagacity. I have had a hint that something is intended and has dropt from 1 which has led to this speculation. I am unwilling to credit the fact, untill I have further evidence, which I am in a train of getting if it exists. It is said that packet boats & expresses are again sent from this place to the Southern States, to buy up the paper of all sorts which has risen in the market here. These & other abuses make it a problem whether the system of the old paper under a bad Government, or of the new under a good one, be chargeable with the greater substantial injustice. The true difference seems to be that by the former the few were the victims to the many; by the latter the many to the few. It seems agreed on all hands now that the bank is a certain & gratuitous augmentation of the capitals subscribed, in a proportion of not less than 40 or 50 [per cent] and if the deferred debt should be immediately provided for in favor of the purchasers of it in the deferred shape, & since the unanimous vote that no change [should] be made in the funding system, my imagination will not attempt to set bounds to the daring depravity of the times. The stock-jobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool & its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, & overawing it by clamours & combinations. Nothing new from abroad. I shall not be in [Philadelphia] till the close of the Week.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (8 August 1791)
1790s

Confidence, Imagination, Problem, Reality

“The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 64.

People, Problem

“For the man who considers himself the best critic generally studies sound and unsound composition with equal interest, being no more greedy for lofty utterances to praise than for contemptible ones to ridicule. In this way technique, grandeur, and propriety in the use of the Latin language are particularly underrated by the armchair critics, who, with an insensibility which goes hand in hand with scurrility, and wishing to read only what they may criticize, cannot, by their very abuse of literature, be making a proper use of it.”
Nam qui maxume doctus sibi videtur, dictionem sanam et insanam ferme appetitu pari revolvit, non amplius concupiscens erecta quae laudet quam despecta quae rideat. atque in hunc modum scientia pompa proprietas linguae Latinae iudiciis otiosorum maximo spretui est, quorum scurrilitati neglegentia comes hoc volens tantum legere, quod carpat, sic non utitur litteris, quod abutitur.

Sidonius Apollinaris (430–489) Gaulish poet, aristocrat and bishop

Lib. 3, Ep. 14, sect. 2; vol. 2, p. 59.
Epistularum

Way, Literature, Study, Reading

“To me it seems much better to love a woman as a woman, than to make her one's idol, as many do. For my part, I am convinced that it is better to use than to abuse.”

Marguerite de Navarre book Heptaméron

Second Day, Novel XII (trans. W. K. Kelly)
L'Heptaméron (1558)

Love, Parting

“Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: The Emotional Life of Nations (2002), Ch. 6, p. 153.

War, Truth, Family, Parent

“I think that the idea of straight edge, the song that I wrote, and the way people have related it it, there's some people who have abused it, they've allowed their fundamentalism to interfere with the real message, which in my mind, was that people should be allowed to live their lives the way they want to.”

Ian MacKaye (1962) American singer and record label owner

http://www.scenepointblank.com/features/102

People, Way, Idea, Thinking

“The policy of the London Cabinet largely contributed to the first movement of our Revolution…. Taking advantage of political tempests (the cabinet) aimed to effect in an exhausted and dismembered France a change of dynasty and to place the Duke of York on the throne of Louis XVI…. Pitt…. is an imbecile, whatever may be said of a reputation that has been much too greatly puffed up. A man who, abusing the influence acquired by him on an island placed haphazard in the ocean, is desirous of contending with the French people, could not have conceived of such an absurd plan elsewhere than in a madhouse.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Quotes from speeches (17 November 1793 & 26 January 1794) in La Révolution: III – Le Gouvernement Révolutionnaire (1883) by Hippolyte Taine, translated as The Revolution Vol. 3 (1885), by John Durand, Book 7 : The Governors, p. 144, footnote 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=dCBKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144

People, Change

“We need to launch a nationwide campaign against superstition and belief in witchcraft. Nigerians should be told that witches are not real, and that witches and spirits are imaginary entities created by primitive minds during the infancy of human race to explain situations and issues they could not understand or resolve commonsensically. This campaign should be taken to all Nigerian schools, colleges and universities. It should be publicized over the radios and television, in the newspapers, in market places, in churches and mosques. In particular, we need to check the activities of our so called pastors and other self styled men and women of God who use the Bible or Holy books to perpetrate and justify atrocious acts and human right abuses. These religious charlatans continue to act and preach in ways that reinforce the belief in witches and provoke acts of witch accusation, persecution and killing. This has been the driving force in Akwa Ibom State, and until Nigerians learn to reject superstition and irrationalism such tragedies will continue to occur.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

Saving Child Witches: A Nigerian Perspective http://enblog.mukto-mona.com/2008/12/14/saving-child-witches-a-nigerian-perspective/ (December 14th, 2008)

Women, Men, God, Books

“Er, will your grandmother tell that fib for you?”
“I guess so. Yes, I'm sure she will. She says people have to tell little white fibs or else people couldn’t stand each other. But she says fibs were meant to be used, not abused.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

“She sounds like a sensible person.”
Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 11

People, Personality

“If you are a boy, they will brainwash you, strap bombs to your body and blow you up. If you are a girl, they will enslave and abuse you.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Message to teenage Britons wanting to join ISIS — "David Cameron tells teenage jihadists they are 'cannon fodder'" by Tim Ross, The Telegraph (19 July 2015) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11748953/David-Cameron-tells-teenage-jihadists-they-are-cannon-fodder.html 2010s, 2015

Girl, Boy

“A master who had been cruel to his slaves might become a slave in his turn, and undergo the torments he had inflicted on others. He who has wielded authority may, in a new existence, be obliged to obey those who formerly bent to his will. Such an existence may be imposed upon him as an expiation if he have abused his power. But a good spirit may also choose an influential existence among the people of some lower race, in order to hasten their advancement; in that case, such a reincarnation is a mission.”

Allan Kardec (1804–1869) systematizer of Spiritism

Source: The Spirits' Book, p. 170.

People

“They (the emperors) frequently abused their power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number;.. But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Four, Chapter VI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four

Life, Men

“Courage (in a soldier) is maintained by a certain anger; anger is a little blind and likes to strike out. And from this follows a thousand abuses, a thousand evils and misfortunes that are impossible to predict in an army during war.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

War, Courage, Evil, Anger

“There were abuses, many of them. I do not pretend to defend these abuses. There were kind masters and cruel masters. There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries. In this one particular slavery doomed itself. When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four bloody years of war.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

On slavery, in her 1919 autobiography Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth Felton, p.79 http://www.google.com/books?id=gHsLIvQ_BN0C&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton&printsec=frontcover&source=in#PPA79,M1.

Men, War, Law, Country

“It is great comedy to hear the secular, pro-gay left, so hostile to states’ rights in virtually every instance, suddenly discover the tyranny of centralized government. The newly minted protectors of local rule find themselves demanding: “Why should Washington dictate marriage standards for Massachusetts and California? Let the people of those states decide for themselves.” This is precisely the argument conservatives and libertarians have been making for decades! Why should Washington dictate education, abortion, environment, and labor rules to the states? The American people hold widely diverse views on virtually all political matters, and the Founders wanted the various state governments to most accurately reflect those views. This is the significance of the 10th Amendment, which the left in particular has abused for decades.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

2000s, 2001-2005

Hostility, Marriage, People, Education

“Those people who think sexual abuse is a black-or-white, all-or-none category are incapable of clear, logical thought.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/282854320133775360 Twitter

People, Thinking

“An employer has no business with a man's personality. Employment is a specific contract calling for a specific performance… Any attempt to go beyond that is usurpation. It is immoral as well as an illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no "loyalty," he owes no "love" and no "attitudes"--he owes performance and nothing else. …. The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 229

Love, Business, Change, Personality

“Bad language or abuse
I never, never use,
Whatever the emergency;
Though "Bother it" I may
Occasionally say,
I never use a big, big D-”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The first Lord's Song (from HMS Pinafore).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 282.

Sex

“A man of remarkable genius may afford to pass by a piece of wit, if it happens to border on abuse. A little genius is obliged to catch at every witticism indiscriminately.”

William Shenstone (1714–1763) English gardener

Essays on Men and Manners (1804)

“Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being." Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2000s, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. 23

World, Imagination

“Yet all this is not ressentiment. These are only stages in the development of its sources. Revenge, envy, the impulse to detract, spite, *Schadenfreude*, and malice lead to ressentiment only if there occurs neither a moral self-conquest (such as genuine forgiveness in the case of revenge) nor an act or some other adequate expression of emotion (such as verbal abuse or shaking one's fist), and if this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence. There will be no ressentiment if he who thirsts for revenge really acts and avenges himself, if he who is consumed by hatred harms his enemy, gives him “a piece of his mind,” or even merely vents his spleen in the presence of others. Nor will the envious fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence. Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear. Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion—and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious—or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by “embittering” and “poisoning” the personality. If an ill-treated servant can vent his spleen in the antechamber, he will remain free from the inner venom of ressentiment, but it will engulf him if he must hide his feelings and keep his negative and hostile emotions to himself.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Hostility, Fear, Feeling, Forgiveness

“The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

The Independent (24 February, 1990).

Home

“Nobody disputes, I believe, that our nuclear weaponry is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities, she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide – the extinction of our race – in the most literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. An officer may, in the hour of his country's defeat and disgrace, commit suicide honourably and rationally with his service revolver; but in any collective context the choice of non-existence, of the obliteration of all future hopes, is insanity.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Downpatrick, County Down (31 May 1983), quoted in The Times (1 June 1983), p. 4
1980s

Life, Hope, Suicide, Time

“This option the consumerit could. The present admirable constitution of the courts of justice in England was, perhaps, originally in a great measure, formed by this emulation, which anciently took place between their respective judges; each judge endeavouring to give, in his own court, the speediest and most effectual remedy, which the law would admit, for every sort of injustice. (The Wealth of Nations [New York: Modern Library, 1937]; originally 1776), p. 679--> retains of being able to buy security wherever he pleases brings about a constant emulation among all the producers, each producer striving to maintain or augment his clientele with the attraction of cheapness or of faster, more complete and better justice.If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers. The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another. In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 57-59

Justice, Law, Communication, Wealth

“If you look at Burke closely, you'll see the prototypical abused child: hypervigilant, distrustful. He's so committed to his family of choice—not his DNA-biological family, which tortured him, or the state which raised him, but the family that he chose—that homicide is a natural consequence of injuring any of that family. He's not a hit man. But he shares the same religion I do, which is revenge.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Andrew Vachss, Horror Online, May 1999.

Family, Religion, Revenge, Nature

“The House of Commons has lifted our affairs above the mechanical sphere into the human sphere. It thrives on criticism, it is perfectly impervious to newspaper abuse or taunts from any quarter, and it is capable of digesting almost anything or almost any body of gentlemen, whatever be the views with which they arrive. There is no situation to which it cannot address itself with vigour and ingenuity. It is the citadel of British liberty; it is the foundation of our laws; its traditions and its privileges are as lively today as when it broke the arbitrary power of the Crown and substituted that Constitutional Monarchy under which we have enjoyed so many blessings.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 "House of Commons Rebuilding" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#column_405. The Second World War (1939–1945)

Law, Housing

“A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. … It's nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully co-exist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace. We're all on the Earth together, and we have to learn some accommodation. … The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for. Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on those who blaspheme against a religion (complete with bounties or reward for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other incitement to cold-blooded murder. … That is — or, rather, ought to be, the message of multiculturalism, not the patronizing and subtly racist hypertolerance that "respects" vicious and ignorant doctrines when they are propounded by officials of non-European states and religions.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Death, Wisdom, Faith, Religion

“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Winston Churchill, Speech to House of Commons on 12th November 1940, 3 days after his death.
About

Love, World, Peace, Faith

Quotes about abuse page 5

Quotes about abuse
page 5