Abusive Quotes

#1. What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides.

Matt Taibbi

#2. I want to say that nobody accuses their parents of abusing them without justification to do that. I didn't just make it up. A lot of things were true and abusive and horrible things that happened to me that my father did.

Roseanne Barr

#3. Men, when they're out of work, tend to become abusive.

Harry Reid

#4. You don't understand," she said meekly. "Really? Okay, you're a special case then, are you? Unlike all the others in abusive relationships, your man really does love you. He's a good man deep down. Tells you he'll change.

Steve McHugh

#5. While it can be aggressive playing rugby, the aggression doesn't leave the rugby pitch. A Real Man doesn't need to use violence or be abusive to others, especially towards his partner and family. I am proud to support the Women's Aid Real Man campaign.

Danny Care

#6. In the US the overwhelming majority of those executed are psychotic, alcoholic, drug addicted or mentally unstable. They frequently are raised in an impoverished and abusive environment. Seldom are people with money or prestige convicted of capital offenses, even more seldom are they executed.

George Ryan

#7. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.

Bell Hooks

#8. Women trapped in violent relationships need to know that there's no shame in talking out and walking out on their abusive partners.

Kate Thornton

#9. Well, I went through some emotionally abusive relationships and allowed myself to not be properly respected as a lady, as a human being even, though I tried everything I knew to be a lady.

Gloria Gaynor

#10. In decision after decision on the bench, Judge [Samuel] Alito has excused abusive actions by the authorities that intrude on the personal privacy and freedoms of average Americans.

Edward Kennedy

#11. A kid in an abusive home has far fewer rights than any POW. There is no Geneva Convention for kids.

Andrew Vachss

#12. To cultivate compassion, try to remember that others are doing the best they can, just like you, and that when someone does something abusive, they are getting something that they feel is positive from the experience.

Sharon Gannon

#13. Any relationships that would reject you for being true to yourself are - by definition - abusive relationships. You'll be much better off when you let them go.

Steve Pavlina

#14. I realized the preserving a relationship at all costs was not as important as affirming the human right to be free from abusive treatment.

Rebecca Ann Parker

#15. despair of ever making it out of slavery and the slum. Psychologists often see the same resistance to escaping in women who are in abusive relationships. They may live in fear and pain, but they refuse to leave the abuser because they are more fearful of the unknown.

Nick Vujicic

#16. This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.

Maggie Stiefvater

#17. HE ISN'T ABUSIVE BECAUSE HE IS ANGRY; HE'S ANGRY BECAUSE HE'S ABUSIVE.

Lundy Bancroft

#18. Domestic violence rarely affects only those directly involved in the abusive relationship.

Asa Don Brown

#19. The No. 1 reason women stay in abusive relationships - because they're not able to take care of themselves financially. It's also the No. 1 reason why women go back.

Kerry Washington

#20. There is a point in most abusive relationships when it occurs to the beaten party that they are guilty of putting their face in the way of someone else's fist.

Sloane Crosley

#21. it's been laid on my heart and I want to help others get away from abusive spouses.

Carolyn Brown

#22. My personal view is that until there is a disincentive to write lies and abusive comments it's going to continue.

Heather Mills

#23. I was an abusive, selfish, needy, angry asshole.
Now I'm just kind of selfish, a little less angry, occasionally needy, with flights of asshole. I've grown.

Marc Maron

#24. Some people have abusive, negative, controlling tendencies in their blood; they are wired for havoc, bickering and deception.

Bryant McGill

#25. The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future

Stefan Molyneux

#26. The reason I gained so much weight in the first place and the reason I had such a sorry history of abusive relationships with men was I just needed approval so much. I needed everyone to like me, because I didn't like myself much.

Oprah Winfrey

#27. (Of course, some people decide to end contact with a family member because of an abusive situation. This decision can be a mature, lifesaving choice.)

Theodora Ross

#28. It is easy to imagine situations where we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we enter an abusive relationship or vote for a fascist. Similarly,

Timothy Snyder

#29. My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. My father was an extremely cold man.

S.E. Hinton

#30. To understand Cerutty you have to see him as a multifaceted personality. He could be both charming and very abusive. He was extremely amusing and darn good company providing you weren't quarrelling with him.

John Landy

#31. The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

Edmund Burke

#32. When infuriated by an outrageous column, do not be suckered into responding with an abusive e-mail. Pundits so targeted thumb through these red-faced electronic missives with delight, saying 'Hah! Got to 'em.'

William Safire

#33. I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.

David Rakoff

#34. The individual that believes God permits a man to hit a woman or speak to her using abusive language, is void of understanding who God is. He condemns violence in any form.

Ellen J. Barrier

#35. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic papacy developed into an abusive, corrupt, autocratic, totalitarian system by claiming apostolic authority through a supposed line of succession back to Peter.

John F. MacArthur Jr.

#36. My Struggles is a record close to me. It's about what I went through at home living with an abusive father.

Missy Elliott

#37. Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#38. The worst thing about being the laureate has been the attitude of a tiny minority of adults who haven't liked some of the things I'm supposed to have said and who have used it as an opportunity to be verbally abusive and nasty, but I haven't let it rule my world!

Malorie Blackman

#39. An abuser isn't abusive 24/7. They usually demonstrate positive character traits most of the time. That's what makes the abuse so confusing when it happens, and what makes leaving so much more difficult.

Miya Yamanouchi

#40. When you live in an alcoholic family or an abusive family, you tiptoe, you don't want to step on any mines.

Glenn Beck

#41. I can't imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.

Billy Bob Thornton

#42. I was 10th of 11 kids in an alcoholic, abusive, poor family. We all want things that we can't have. And I found comedy.

Louie Anderson

#43. Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on.

Jane Mayer

#44. Without financial literacy, divorce rates soar, families rupture, and women stay with abusive men for financial security. A lack of jobs contributes to riots and illegal activity. Name any situation and it goes back to money. We need to focus on poverty eradication.

John Hope Bryant

#45. Girls may try to avoid being alone at all costs, including remaining in an abusive friendship.

Rachel Simmons

#46. All too often, we make decisions from a place of pain, insecurity or fear and we let those negative thoughts guide our behavior, ruin opportunities and be the reason we choose poor friends and abusive partners.

Elona Washington

#47. You fall in love with it a little. Depression. It's an abusive romance. It hurts like hell but you don't want it to stop, because at least hurt is a feeling. At least it reminds you you're still alive.

Leah Raeder

#48. We were just a gaggle of kids, and everybody played together and had a good time. You know how kids can be completely horrible - abusive but fun. But anyway, it was a nice childhood.

Peter Jurasik

#49. We want to state this carefully: a spouse who is evil, distant, cruel, unloving, or abusive should not use this information to demand more sex from his wife without first dealing with his sin.

Mark Driscoll

#50. And we're at four. Alexis Ann, I think we're in an abusive relationship.

Melissa A. Craven

#51. The rule of thumb is that if someone is able to be verbally or physically abusive, he or she is able to understand that the behavior is wrong.

Edward T. Welch

#52. I like kindness. Who doesn't? Life is definitely too short for self-centered, abusive people.

Ellen Greene

#53. I've stood up to producers before, and even a director. I saw them being abusive. A lot of people on the set are scared to say stuff when they're not being treated right.

Natalie Portman

#54. Commerce is abusive. It's very hobbling to always be saying, 'Please let me put this out, this thing I've worked on for years.' It's like a nasty parent saying, 'No! Now go to your room.' As publishing companies got bigger, you felt even less significant.

Patti Davis

#55. Finally coming to terms with Fathers Day. I blow as a Dad. I get it. No, I'm not an evil, abusive Father, it's just that while all my intentions and thoughts have been out of love for my kids, my actions and behaviour never measured up.

Geoffrey Hill

#56. I can't stand to watch anything that I'm in. I tear it apart. The worst thing you can do is leave me alone and let me watch what I'm in. It's abusive.

Elias Koteas

#57. I grew up with an extremely abusive father. As a mother, I wanted to protect my own children from exposure to violence. When I found out one of my daughters was in an abusive relationship, it broke my heart. Finally, she left him ?- but only after his abuse started spreading to the children.

Ginny Brown-Waite

#58. When someone comes up to me and says, 'Mary, you helped save my marriage', or, 'Mary, you helped me get out of this abusive relationship', I'm in it, really in their lives. And I'm so passionate about my feelings, but also about showing people the way through theirs.

Mary J. Blige

#59. Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe
they should be. They become very self-abusive, and they use other people to abuse themselves as well.

Miguel Ruiz

#60. So James refusing to sit down was a big deal. Unheard of. Like a black child suddenly saying in an English accent to its mama, "No, madam, I will not retrieve a switch so that you may beat me with it. I believe your request to be not only abusive, but also absurd.

Ernessa T. Carter

#61. They feed their demon and it gets really strong and then it makes them stay in abusive relationships

Amy Poehler

#62. What slavery really demonstrated was that we don't really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric.

Andrew Nikiforuk

#63. Of all the sicknesses, there is probably none more abusive than homophobia.

Tracy Morgan

#64. Newspapers, television networks, and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical. But it hardly follows that elimination of a strong and independent press is the way to eliminate abusiveness ...

Potter Stewart

#65. There's so much going on, with child abuse, not having the right relationships and being in abusive relationships, that play into her, and that energy was constantly in my body for a month. I was the lead character and it was very, very intense.

Tinsel Korey

#66. A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century - and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.

Noam Chomsky

#67. Some parents let their kids sleep at other people's houses, where they drink alcohol, watch TV for hours and God knows what else. But if you say you have to get all A's and practice the violin for two hours, then they consider that abusive. That upsets me.

Amy Chua

#68. I have a temper, but I wouldn't call me abusive.

Tatum O'Neal

#69. I saw a guy being really abusive to his girlfriend. She was asking people to help, but no one would. When he grabbed her, I tried to separate them, but he turned on me. I punched him and knocked him down. It wasn't a scandal; I was just doing what anybody should.

Timothy Hutton

#70. I've struggled with many forms of mental illness since I was a kid, but clinical depression is a semiregular visitor and anxiety disorder is my long-term abusive boyfriend.

Jenny Lawson

#71. Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.

Sherman Alexie

#72. You can die trying to get along with a disagreeable man," she said, and I put a star beside it when I wrote it down and then taped it to the rear-view mirror for the rest of the drive. She hadn't said "abusive," I noticed; she had said that just disagreeable could kill you.

Debby Bull

#73. An abusive relationship should be easy to identify though often one of the most difficult to end.

Desmond Tutu

#74. Let's start working towards wellness, a healing in our community, a healing in relationships, so male and female can finally sit down and understand that that young boy or young girl saw behavior exhibited by their parents that was negative and abusive and they're going to pass it on.

Pam Grier

#75. Our culture encourages women to nurture men, making it predictable that many experience a seductive empathy for abusive men, as well as the misguided hope that love can obliterate an ugly past.

Leslie Morgan Steiner

#76. Calvin had a talent for inventing abusive nicknames and he styled this amorphous opposition 'Libertines', which had a conveniently scandalous resonance, while also reflecting the undoubted fact that his opponents sought a freedom for which he saw no need.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

#77. frankness of her character in her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time all intercourse

Jane Austen

#78. Anybody who has anything abusive to say of women, whether ancient or modern, can command a vast public in the popular press and a ready agreement from the average publisher.

Dora Russell

#79. When I was growing up, the men in my life were abusive; women were the ones I ran to for comfort.

Kevyn Aucoin

#80. There's people who think what they need and what they deserve in their lives is a lot worse than what they actually do, so they get themselves involved in things that are needlessly painful: brutal relationships, abusive relationships.

Adam Duritz

#81. For decades, many therapists have been attempting to help abusive men change by guiding them in identifying and expressing feelings. Alas, this well-meaning but misguided approach actually feeds the abuser's selfish focus on himself, which is an important force driving his abusiveness.

Lundy Bancroft

#82. You and I are so much alike, Isa; different, but alike. You threw yourself into your artwork to help cope with your abusive situation and to let your secret desires out, and I embraced it to forget about my parents' death.

Ella Dominguez

#83. ...Studies have found that children who witness abuse are more likely to accept relationships that are abusive.

Asa Don Brown

#84. Because the perpetrators typically have little understanding as to why they are sexually assaulting children, they usually are unable to stop after the first assault. Abusive behavior continues until a crisis of some kind prevents further abuse.

Tony Martens

#85. Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps 'evil.' Yet predatory commerce ("the free market" as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of 'get the most and pay the least.

James Hillman

#86. An abusive relationship is worse than being in prison. I mean literally, not figuratively.

Joe Biden

#87. Many neglected and abused children grow up to be adults who are afraid to take risks of striking out on their own. Many will remain dependent on their abusive parents and unable to separate from them. Others leave their abusive parents only to attach themselves to a partner who is controlling.

Beverly Engel

#88. The bottom line was that I was in an abusive relationship.

Shannon Celebi

#89. Certainly, words can be as abusive as any blow ... When a three-year-old yells, "You're so stupid! What a dummy!" it doesn't carry the same weight as when a mother yells those words to a child ... Even if you don't physically abuse young children, you can still drive them nuts with your words.

Mary Blakely

#90. I again invoke my favorite analogy for eating disorders: abusive lovers. And what do you do when someone is in an abusive relationship? You don't allow visitation rights, weekly dates. You don't put them in the vicinity of or let the abuser flirt with them. You keep them the fuck away.

Kelsey Osgood

#91. Most African women are taught to endure abusive marriages. They say endurance means a good wife but most women endure abusive relationship because they are not empowered economically; they depend on their husbands.

Joyce Banda

#92. I think I'm equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the "Letters and Tomatoes" column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.

Al Yankovic

#93. I have no perspective as regards my work. One reason I put out records and books is people respond to it, and it enables you to actually see the work more clearly. It's a form of therapy for me. Sometimes abusive therapy.

Moby

#94. Who the hell knows where they get these farkakte names for their kids. One of Rita's friends named her son Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva Rosenblatt. Can you imagine? Rita always says, 'It's no big deal. They call him 'Bodi', is all.' Please. And the newspapers say I'm abusive to children?

Susan Jane Gilman

#95. The squirrels on campus were beyond domestic; they were practically domestically abusive.

Rainbow Rowell

#96. You are aggressive", says the emotional abusive.

Mark Brightlife

#97. People spend so much time wondering why the women don't leave. Where are all the people who wonder why the men are even abusive? Isn't that where the only blame should be placed?

Colleen Hoover

#98. Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.

David Sedaris

#99. Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.

John Ortberg

#100. A disturbed fan used that information and showed up at my front door, made his way INTO MY HOUSE, and afterward, proceeded to obsess over me online in an erratic and abusive way to the extent that I was terrified he would show up again and do something violent.

Felicia Day