Mutilation Quotes

• I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it.

  George Grosz

  Wise, War, People

  George Grosz (1982). “The autobiography of George Grosz: a small yes and a big no”

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• There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

  Nicholas D. Kristof

  Black, Literature, Matter

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• Heroism is latent in every human soul - However humble or unknown, they (the veterans) have renounced what are accounted pleasures and cheerfully undertaken all the self-denials - privations, toils, dangers, sufferings, sicknesses, mutilations, life-long hurts and losses, death itself - for some great good, dimly seen but dearly held.

  Joshua Chamberlain

  Memorial Day, Courage, Hurt

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• Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sacrifice, Self, Survival

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.195, Wordsworth Editions

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• Female genital mutilation targets little girls, baby girls - fragile angels who are helpless, who cannot fight back. It's a crime against a child, a crime against humanity. It's abuse. It's absolutely criminal and we have to stop it.

  Waris Dirie

  Girl, Baby, Children

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• Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.

  Andre Malraux

  Art, Struggle, Dark

  "The Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Doubleday, Part IV, Chapter VII, 1953.

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• Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.

  Erik Erikson

  Children, May, Principles

  Erik H. Erikson (1993). “Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History”, p.70, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.

  James Fenton

  Country, Children, War

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• Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

  Lewis Mumford

  Peace, War, Misery

  Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner (2010). “Technics and Civilization”, p.93, University of Chicago Press

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• For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

  Frances Farmer

  Being Alone, Cells, Years

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• I wanted to die, then. I wanted to destroy the body I was trapped in, become what she was, no matter what it took. No matter how much mutilation or pain. But he looked away, at me. He pulled my face down and pressed my lips against his like he was almost trying to suffocate us both.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Sad, Suicide, Pain

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• Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Self, Lust, Want

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• I survived this torture which left me paralyzed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violence through sex. I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability.

  Tori Amos

  Sex, Night, Years

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• I don't have any plugs or tucks but people do what they want. I look at it as mutilation.

  Jack Nicholson

  People, Looks, Want

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• The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Christian, Self Confidence, Pride

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL - Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: The Critique of the Traditional Morality and the Philosophy of the Past”, p.36, e-artnow

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• For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray [sic] days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Suicide, Morning, Self Harm

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• Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Girl, Teenage, Hate

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• Mutilation is the badge that can never be taken off, and sets us apart from all others. Pain is important to the bonding-a physical horror that bonds us ever tighter to all those who have partaken. The intensity of the experience helps to widen the gulf between us and those who have not shared.

  Clive Barker

  Pain, Taken, Important

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• What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from -- I cannot name it. But I am separated.

  Arthur Adamov

  Names, Suffering, Firsts

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• Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.

  Donald Barthelme

  Prayer, Writing, Editing

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• Exploitation, mutilation, mutations, confirmation to the evils of the world.

  Stevie Wonder

  Evil, Mutation, World

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• If you add up all the forms of genocide, from female infanticide and genital mutilation to so-called honor crimes, sex trafficking, and domestic abuse, everything, we lose about 6 million humans every year just because they were born female. That's a holocaust every year.

  Gloria Steinem

  Sex, Years, Holocaust

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• Part of the main plan of imperialism... is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past...What's more truly frightening is the defacement, the mutilation, and ultimately the eradication of history in order to create... an order that is favorable to the United States.

  Edward Said

  Writing, Past, Order

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• A writer should always bravely face life, risking death and mutilation in order to dethrone an emperor.

  Mo Yan

  Order, Faces, Should

  Mo Yan (2013). “The Republic of Wine: A Novel”, p.157, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Self-mutilation is a frightening barrier that keeps us from seeing a person who is lost, in pain, and in desperate need of help.

  Steven Levenkron

  Pain, Self, Needs

  Steven Levenkron (1999). “Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation”, p.19, W. W. Norton & Company

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