Society Denial Quotes

#1. Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.

Jack Kornfield

#2. After accepting the bitter truth of society, I set myself out to lead a life for myself entirely. I realized that the poisonous tentacles of society does not spare anyone, especially people like us. Once I realized that, I became strong from within.

Santosh Avvannavar

#3. Societies have a peculiar way of relating, or more accurately non-relating, to rape maybe because it is so vicious, they choose to live in denial about it.

Aysha Taryam

#4. Victims of violent crime are not always believed ...
[referring to victim testimony at serial killer and pedophile Marc Detroux's trial]

Natascha Kampusch

#5. People do not emphasize with victims and give them limitless sympathy, but can very quickly switch to aggression and rejection

Natascha Kampusch

#6. Some of the experiences endured by human beings on this earth are virtually unbelievable.

Aphrodite Matsakis

#7. No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.

Mahatma Gandhi

#8. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.

Garrett Hardin

#9. Speaking out about ritual abuse brings more information and potential understanding about this issue to a society steeped in denial. There are many similar or related horrors in the world that are also denied.

Jadelinn

#10. It wasn't just heartbreaking but it broke my identity! All that anguish that was deep hidden in me because rejections from family and friends started to pour out like a current in the sea that would seem destructive.

Santosh Avvannavar

#11. DENIAL
Defense mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant realities is disavowed; refers to keeping out of conscious awareness any aspects of external reality that, if acknowledged, would produce anxiety.

Benjamin James Sadock

#12. You sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.

Nell Freudenberger

#13. It's a wonder of human behavior: we build our own handcuffs that trap and harm us. We create the myth, and we honor it. We tell the lie, and we believe it.

Raif Badawi

#14. As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million. [James Henderson, "Incest", in A. M. Freedman, H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. 1975 p. 1532.]

Judith Lewis Herman

#15. It [treating trauma] may even cause you to reconsider some of your previous views of the world and to revise your sociopolitical perspectives.

Aphrodite Matsakis

#16. Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass

#17. With respect to the acceptance of dissociative disorders, as with most issues in life, it is counterproductive to spend time trying to convince people of things they don't want to know.

Warwick Middleton

#18. And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society's simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves.

Natascha Kampusch

#19. Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.

Ishmael Reed

#20. What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure.

Jon Ronson

#21. As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences.

Aphrodite Matsakis

#22. The truth is: Everyone will judge you. But this depends upon your intellectual capacity whether you are able to distinguish constructive criticism between an insult coming from other people's opinions about you.

Anonymous

#23. So often in our society, we are encouraged to disregard our fears and to simply "think positive thoughts". This is nothing more than engaging in denial which is not only ineffective, it is unhealthy.

Robin S. Sharma

#24. It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself (p. 5)

Cathy Caruth

#25. If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.

Jeanette Winterson

#26. The more I learn, the less I know: the less I know, the less I understand: the less I understand, the less I can relate; I know you're crazy.

Al Diaz

#27. Society at present suffers far more from waste of money than from want of it. There is dignity in every attempt to economise. It indicates self-denial and imparts strength of character. It produces a well-regulated mind.

Morarji Desai

#28. The fabric of society is woven together by the needle of suppression and denial.

Dov Davidoff

#29. Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

W. H. Auden

#30. Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.

Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

#31. When we deny the poor and the vulnerable their own human dignity and capacity for freedom and choice, it becomes self-denial. It becomes a denial of both our collective and individual dignity, at all levels of society.

Jacqueline Novogratz

#32. You can either follow your dreams or adjust with your society's expectations ... Either way, consequences are uncertain ... the path to glory or the boulevard of mediocrity, both lead to the grave ... Choose what's worthwhile, for the end is the same.

K. Hari Kumar

#33. Suicide is an attack on society
an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.

Robert E. Neale

#34. We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear - by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control.

Anna C. Salter

#35. Today's society is wanting in such a way that Honor, Integrity, Trust, Compassion, Empathy are left for the homeless and their pets.

Solange Nicole

#36. In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.

Aphrodite Matsakis

#37. To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.

Bell Hooks