Quotes about Abuse

Freedom of opinion! Where is it? I see a press more mean and paltry and silly and disgraceful than any country ever knew, - if that be its standard, here it is. ... I speak of Miss Martineau, and all parties... shower down upon her a perfect cataract of abuse. "But what has she done? Surely she praised America enough!" - "Yes, but she told us of some of our faults, and Americans can't bear to be told of their faults.

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.

When we hear a story of the abuse of a child or the abuse of women almost all people are appalled by instances of that kind.

It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.

I was mentally, emotionally and verbally abused by my father as far back as I can remember until I left home at the age of eighteen

What men know and presume about the earth is part of it, passing always back into it, carried on by it into what they do not know. Even their abuses of it, their diminishments and dooms, belong to it.

The willingness to abuse other bodies is the willingness to abuse one's own. To damage the earth is to damage your children. To despise the ground is to despise its fruit; to despise the fruit is to despise its eaters. The wholeness of health is broken by despite" (The Unsettling of America).

No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless

the central question was how to remember rightly. And given my Christian sensibilities, my question from the start was, How should I remember abuse as a person committed to loving the wrongdoer and overcoming evil with good?

When purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable

When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility

The worst of the curses that people inflict on us, the real abuse and terror, can't be forgotten or undone, but they can be put to good use in the new life that one has taken up. It is a kind of death; the lid closes on what went before. But the past is not denied. And we are still here, with all of our talents, gifts, and failings, our strengths and weaknesses. All the baggage comes along: nothing wasted, nothing lost.