c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the experts consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others.
— Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
Under every stone lurks a politician.
— Aristophanes
In their quest for power and self-importance, to compensate for whatever feelings of social inadequacy or sexual insecurity, they (Politicians)are prepared to perpetrate something which is hard to distinguish from mass murder if they think they can get away with it...
— Auberon Waugh
A politician has an axe to grindWith which he aims to chop off half your mind.
— Chris I. Naylor
I wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice if I just stopped talking.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
— Ronald Reagan
When Jackson used that particular tone of voice, men died, pure and simple.
— Christine Feehan, Safe Harbor
All I have is a voice.
— W.H. Auden
His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in the wilderness", but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land.
— Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics
The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes,--and to speak.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work. 
— Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
He doesn't hear but sees the Voice.
— Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job
We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.
— Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice
Your volume speaks volumes. Be aware of your dynamics, your tones as well as the loudness and softness of your voice on the phone and in person.
— Loren Weisman
Intuition is a sacred voice.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he shatter her? 'What has this god of yours ever really done for you?' She stood very still for a long moment, her back to him. 'Everything.
— Francine Rivers, A Voice in the Wind
Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.
— Rebecca Solnit
Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
I am a human, I have a voice and I'm not shy to raise it for honesty and truth against mistreatment and lies. I'd rather die than go silent because I know my silence will never protect me from malice and my pretence will never give me peace and joy. Love me or hate me because I stand for truth no matter what and the truth will set me free.
— Euginia Herlihy
There are so many different ways for someone to say your name. I’m not sure I ever realized that before I met Jesse. Prior to him, it was just Rose calling out to me with love and affection or Gideon relaying his quiet approval or disapproval. Crisp, clear notes. When Jesse says my name, it’s a chord, a mash-up of several intense emotions all reflected in two syllables.
— Paula Stokes, Ferocious
I’d scream, but I have no voice. The bullies stole it from me
— If I Wake
Can you be inside and outside at the same time?I think this is where I live.I think this is where most women live.I know this is where writers live.Inside to write. Outside to glean.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
The stronger you become, the lower your voice become.
— Moosa Rahat
Besides, my life is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe to be without a voice.
— E.B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan
Hello, Rylan,"Ivy greets me. Even with her transformation, her voice still has that magical quality about it. Her white arms wrap me in a hug, which I return. Throughout the room, I can hear disappointed sighs; the crazy-hot babe is taken.
— Colleen Boyd, Swamp Angel
You discover your voice. You matter. Maybe not to the world, yet. You matter to yourself. You're worthy.
— K.J. Kilton
Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were read with coals.
— David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl
There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
That was the day I made up my mind, I am the voice of those who don't have the strength to cry.
— Dr. Lonnie Rex, My Amazing Adventures with God
Don’t pass my voice, what I said about! If you want to-pack the expression, the context and even the body language with it. Misunderstandings are like by-product of mishandling the whole transportation of what was said.
— Praveen Chenna
Only humans can voice the adoration and plea that goes up silently from the rest of creation, and only humans can withhold their voices from it.
— Kim Coleman Healy, From Beholding to Becoming: Praying Through the Life of Christ
In solitude, you listen to sacred voice.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.
— Frederick Buechner
It only takes one voice to give others the chance to see possibilities.
— Aimee Carter, Queen
My voice is never much louder than a ripple, but even small voices sound loud when you talk about things that matter.
— Natalie Lloyd, The Key to Extraordinary
Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven. It was a miracle and he wept for the gift of bearing witness.
— Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.
— Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
Writing is the painting of the voice.
— Voltaire
I like your voice the most in this world.
— Natsuki Kizu
In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wing. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness.
— Terry Tempest Williams
Surely she'd heard voices like his, so low-pitched as to make every commonplace utterance seem of the deepest intimacy, every cliche a delicious secret.
— Loretta Chase, Miss Wonderful
A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars poetica.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Speaking and listening are a form of psychic breathing.
— Carol Gilligan
Just because an impressive storm doesn’t touch you, you must not find it beautiful! Lend an ear to the voices of those which are under the storm!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live.For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire.All voice is but echo caught from a soundless voice.Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire,But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in which all joys should rejoice.
— Robert Penn Warren, Selected Poems, 1923-1975
...it only takes one voice, at the right pitch, to start an avalanche.
— Dianna Hardy, Return Of The Wolf
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
It’s good to want God to speak to you, but smarter to let God speak through you, because when God speaks through you, more than one can hear.
— Donald L. Hicks, Look into the stillness
The voice, for its part, has the peculiarity that when released it carries the weight of the body from which it has come; since that weight is erotic reality, lovers believe they can embrace words of love, they believe they can make them into a continuum of love that will last forever.
— César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind
I felt his voice. Fingers rubbing moss. Smoke curling. Wood worn and smoothed over time. His voice had darkness in it that hovered close to the ground, like a mist hanging over a lake deep in a forest at dusk. A bolt of sea-green velvet. A sensation as much as a series of sounds. It reverberated inside me.
— M.J. Rose, The Witch of Painted Sorrows
Every Nigerian must begin to raise their voice against our societal failures and call them as such at every juncture. In this way we could all bring about a modern, progressive and civilized society.
— Sunday Adelaja
You are distinguished in life by your ability to recognize and follow God`s voice on daily basis.
— Sunday Adelaja
People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When something needs to be said, I'll say it even if the whole world grabs me by the neck and tells me to keep quiet.
— Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
His voice is so low I can feel it brushing my waist.
— Chelsea Fine, Sophie & Carter
Voicing out your concerns in a calmly way is a great thing to do and it helps and saves lives of those who can't speak up.
— Euginia Herlihy
It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
He said that things could be different in Little Rock, if only the right people could find their voice. I wanted to be on of those people.
— Kristin Levine, The Lions of Little Rock
For the soul-wounded woman. Your healed voice is my favorite sound. Your hurts, they walk right into our hearts; but your story of healing --- that can change lives. Never be afraid to find and use your voice.
— Jo Ann Fore, When a Woman Finds Her Voice: Overcoming Life's Hurts & Using Your Story to Make a Difference
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
— Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text
...what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.
— Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction
His voice is muddy, that's what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there's dirt in it too, deep, dark dirt, like the garden in October.
— Jael McHenry
The story I'm writing finds its own﻿ voice while I'm writing it.
— Holly Lisle
When we share those stories we've been scared to share, voicelessness loses it's wicked grasp.
— Jo Ann Fore
Not everything is meant for all to hear.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Finding one’s voice is a process of finding one’s passion.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
We know the quality of another’s heart through her voice.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. She grew still to listen.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
Once you know that you have a voice,” Louis said, “it’s no longer the voice that matters, but what is behind the voice.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Your voice is the wildest thing you own,” Brooke says to me. “And you’re giving it away. You can’t see it. Your obsession is blinding you.” He is angry. He is talking in shorthand. “You’re losing yourself.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
«Per­ho­nen is not here any­more,» it says, with a voice made of wings and whis­pers.
— Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince
A model is an actor without a voice.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” —Allen Ginsberg, WD
— Jodi Woody
All I know: I could only encounter you, my oasis, coming out of a desert. Deserted myself. This is all right. My futureless and solitary self. When suddenly I hear the voice of the springs--Right away you made me want to sing. To cry. Then to drink. But after the desert, the merest trickle of water sounds like a storm. And ever since, Promethea's every murmur shakes my life like an earthquake. I was asleep. I was not thirsty. It would have been possible for me not to hear the first three tears. Ever since I never sleep. I listen.
— Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.
— Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
There was something strangely compelling about a Japanese guy with lamb-chop sideburns and a voice so shrill you could be forgiven for thinking his testicles were wired to the national grid.
— Jamie Holoran, Rounder's People
Voices and faces aren't manifestationsof good or bad.
— Gail Carson Levine, Fairest
The volume of your voice does not increase the validity of your argument.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski
— Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis
Speak your mind, even though your voice shakes.
— Maggie Kuhn
We look so very different from the way we sound. It’s a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you’re forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.
— Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air
Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities. . . In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task.
— Joan Biskupic
Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.
— Slavoj Žižek, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects: [SIC 1]
The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.
— Marianne Faithfull
The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
— Victor LaValle
So they're looking for a new face, with a voice to go along. I can tell you right now that ain't my style. I don't do no sing alongs, with my freedom.
— Tegan Quin
Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
The wounded recognized the wounded.
— Nora Roberts, Rising Tides
THOSE WHO SAID IT CAN'T BE DONE...SHOULDN'T GET IN MY WAY WHILE I'M DOING IT!
— Rosetta D. Hoessli, Falling Through Ice
He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.
— Andrew Vachss, Blue Belle
Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as “oppositional defiant disorder,” meaning “This kid hates my guts and won’t do anything I tell him to do,” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage.
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Abusive parents have inappropriate expectations of their children, with a reversal of dependence needs. Parents treat an abused child as if the child were older than the parents. A parent often turns to the child for reassurance, nurturing, comfort, and protection and expects a loving response.
— Benjamin James Sadock
When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one -- if not dozens -- of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young children for decades, and he did nothing to stop it. How much does God believe the pope's argument that Vatican PR trumps pedophilia? Joe Ratzinger, 82, will soon find out.
— Mark Morford
But in any case, validity, offender self-reports have dubious validity, especially when the offender's self-interest is at stake. The only rule for deception in sex offenders I have ever found is this: If it is in the offender's best interests to lie, and if he can do it and not get caught, he will lie. Being victimized as a child has become a ready excuse for perpetrating child molestation. The offender who claims he himself was victimized gets seen as less of a "monster" than one who wasn't a victim, and he gains much more empathy and support. It is hard to trust self-reports of sex offenders about abuse in their past when such reports are in their best interest.Only a few studies on this topic have used objective measures, and they have found very different results.[102]
— Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
It is, after all, far too easy to pinch and kick the bizarre Mormon Church; to say it's ripe for satire and parody is to say a Catholic schoolgirl is ripe for debauchery. It's like shooting polygamist fish in a barrel of coffee.
— Mark Morford
I'm still not sure if I was a victim or not... and if I was, who was my abuser?
— Eskay Teel, Alice in Worcestershire: Brummie girls do cry
You are not mad. You are recovering from trauma. Mad people abused you,
— Alice Little, Healing the Traumatised Adult
Anyone who shames survivors of trauma and abuse for not healing, is a person who has no compassion for life's suffering
— Alice Little, Healing the Traumatised Adult
I live in a world where not being molested as a child is considered luck.
— Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species
Because children take everything personally, they believe that if they are being mistreated, it's because they haven't been “good enough.” Being good as an adult makes them believe, incorrectly, that they have some control in life. They think that they will be rewarded for their goodness and that it will protect them from harm.
— Marcia Sirota
The happy family is a myth for many.
— Carolyn Spring
The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers.
— Warwick Middleton
As a child you received messages from your family to keep your mouth shut and remain invisible. You also learned to become invisible in order to protect yourself. You no longer need to be invisible to survive. If people do not notice you, they may not abuse you, but they also will not love you or attend to your needs. Make yourself and your needs known.
— Beverly Engel, The Right to Innocence
When there is abuse by itself it's scary enough. When there is abuse within a religious setting it is so terrifying to people. Look how long its taken the Ryan report of 2009 took till then to talk about ritualistic kinds of abuse children in Ireland went through at the hands of nuns and priests, so nobody can bear it when its linked to religion, but when it's linked to religion that is not mainstream it seems to frighten people more. As if yes, abuse exists, Satanism exists, but you can't have Satanist abuse.
— Valerie Sinason
When there is abuse by itself it's scary enough. When there is abuse within a religious setting it is so terrifying to people... nobody can bear it when it's linked to religion, but when it's linked to religion that is not mainstream it seems to frighten people more. As if yes, abuse exists, Satanism exists, but you can't have Satanist abuse.
— Valerie Sinason
Sometimes the guys who look the most normal are the biggest pervs of all.
— Teddy Wayne, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
The more we idealized the past, however, and refuse to acknowledge or childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.
— Alice  Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
One of the reasons a survivor finds it so difficult to see herself as a victim is that she has been blamed repeatedly for the abuse: "If you weren't such a whore, this wouldn't have to happen." Each time she is used and trashed, she becomes further convinced of her innate badness. She sees herself participating in forbidden sexual activity and may often get some sense of gratification from it even if she doesn't want to (it is, after all, a form of touch, and our bodies respond without the consent of our wills). This is seen as further proof that the abuse is her fault and well deserved. In her mind, she has become responsible for the actions of her abusers. She believes she is not a victim; she is a loathsome, despicable, worthless human being—if indeed she even qualifies as human. When the abuse has been sadistic in nature...these beliefs are futher entrenched.
— Diane Mandt Langberg, Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse
Psychological abuse is.. the sustained, repetitive, inappropriate behavior which damages or substantially reduces the creative and developmental potential of crucially important mental faculties and mental processes of a child, including intelligence, memory, recognition, perception, attention, imagination, and moral development.
— Kieran O'Hagan
Richard Gardner (2004), the creator of ‘‘parental alienation syndrome’’, considers that the ‘‘parental alienation syndrome (PAS) is primarily a disorder of childhood. The false memory syndrome (FMS) is a disorder of young adults, primarily women. They share in common a campaign of acrimony against a parent’’. In reality, these so-called syndromes are both used to discredit the testimony of individuals who claim to have been abused, sexually or otherwise. When adults report that they have recovered memories of childhood abuse, others may claim that they have false memory syndrome. When children do not repress or forget the abuse, if there is no period of amnesia, then some may claim that they have parental alienation syndrome (Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Dallam, 1999).
— Jenny Ann Ryberg
Dissociative Identity Disorder...is initially a useful coping response to an environment which is very difficult to endure. The problem is that dissociative responses-such as switching, blanking out, or going into a trance-become automatic, and, once the original abusive environment has been left behind, are of little use in life and may be detrimental.
— Elizabeth Howell, Knowing, Not-Knowing and Sort-Of-Knowing: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Uncertainty
..[The] disclosure of the incest secret initiates a profound crisis for the family usually...the abuse has been going on for a number of years and has become an integral part of family life. Disclosure disrupts whatever fragile equilibrium has been maintained, jeopardizes the functioning of all family members, increases the likelihood of violent and desperate behavior, and places everyone, but particularly the daughter, at risk for retaliation.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest: With a New Afterword
For many people, the shock of sexual abuse pales before the shock of this mother’s statement, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” So thoroughly is motherhood sentimentalized that the mother who wishes to be rid of her child is considered a monster. In reality, women have always greeted the burden of motherhood ambivalently, even in the best of circumstances, and many women bear children involuntarily. But the approbrium which attaches to any woman who willing gives up her child is so great that some mothers will keep and mistreat their children rather than admit that they cannot care for them. Sometimes, the revelation of maternal neglect constitutes a plea for outside intervention, signaling the fact that a mother wants to be relieved of the duty to care for her child.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest: With a New Afterword
Behind the door was where bad things happen. No matter how many blankets I used or extra pairs of panties I wore. None of it mattered. The monster always came. His face obscured in the shadows, partially hidden behind the cloak rack. Hot breath breathing over my face as soon as I closed my eyes.
— Hannah Baston, Alone: A shocking story of child abuse
Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest: With a New Afterword
There are generally three parties to child abuse: the abused, the abuser and the bystander.
— Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace
Beyond telling and getting away however there are an awful lot of myths out there about how to move on or get justice. People may tell you to report the crime or confront you abuser- or even to forgive him. I don't necessarily advocate any of these things. I think counseling of some kind can be enormously useful, but the bottom line is that the main way to heal is to find people who will support you, to talk about what happened, and to ground yourself in the reality that the abuse was not your fault, that you have nothing to be ashamed of, and that you deserve great love and happiness in your life.
— Patti Feuereisen, Invisible Girls: The Truth About Sexual Abuse--A Book for Teen Girls, Young Women, and Everyone Who Cares About Them
You may experience waves of disbelief after each memory you retrieve. Whether as a phase or waves, the disbelief is usually accompanied by massive self-hate and guilt. ‘How can I even think such a thing? I must really be warped,’ you tell yourself.
— Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse of children now presents society with the ultimate crisis of patriarchy, when children refuse to protect their fathers by keeping secrets.
— Beatrix Campbell
It doesn't matter if you come from money or you are poor: If your family has already made you feel that you are not worthy, you begin to believe it, and when someone comes along and tells you that you are beautiful/special/wonderful and showers you with attention and gifts, or offers you money when you desperately need it, you are vulnerable and ready to trust
— Patti Feuereisen, Invisible Girls: The Truth About Sexual Abuse--A Book for Teen Girls, Young Women, and Everyone Who Cares About Them
As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest: With a New Afterword
This was a new buzz, better than anything I’d tried before. For the first time, I could fight back at others. I’d even fight with a parked car! I was totally kyboshed on these drugs, I didn’t care how many boys were standing outside the pub, I’d run over and fight the lot of them. Even though I came off second best, in my mind, I still walked away a winner. I showed them I wasn’t a little shit-bag that always got battered, not when I had the drugs in me.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
Gazing out of the window, the gravel path roared as it was crushed into submission under the wheels of the car that was taking me towards a menacing looking medieval castle with two huge and terrifying turrets that seemingly reached out towards me. I imagined that I was the gravel and the wheels of the car were the social care system.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
If you could get anything at all off Santa, what would it be?’	I asked for a fire engine and sweets. Bunty exclaimed in delight, ‘Santa will get you that, but you and Scott will need to leave out a bowl of milk and some carrots for Rudolph.’	‘Who’s Rudolph?’ I asked.	Bunty told me in confidence that Rudolph was Santa’s reindeer and that he helped pull all the children’s toys in the world over the snow. I couldn’t wait.	In readiness for Rudolph, Scott, Martha, Bunty and I picked out four of the biggest carrots from a bag in the kitchen, which we then washed. We found a big bowl that we used to lick the cream out of, which we filled with milk. We put the bowl along with the carrots under the Christmas tree, with all the other children’s offerings. Then Bunty and Martha came in and washed us, put us to bed and read us a story, before kissing us good night. On their way out they said, ‘When you wake up, Santa will have been'.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
Leading up to Christmas, there was talk of Santa. But I’d never even heard of Santa. Bunty, one of the workers who I grew to love, tried to explain, ‘He brings little angels like you, presents.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
I was becoming a product of society, a hardened juvenile! Now I was becoming rebellious and hateful.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.And the hundredth boy?We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.
— Mary Doria Russell, Epitaph
No matter what tight corner I was in, I was capable of getting myself out of it … not God!
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
Just as much as the media portray child sexual exploitation as being a 'hidden' crime, then that is no less of a case with child physical abuse.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
A lot of attention has been given over to the Catholic Churches sexual abuse of children in their care, but this attention seems to have been hijacked by the media and has overshadowed the many thousands of victims that endured physical abuse.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
You might think the Bangkok Hilton (the nickname of a fictional prison in Bangkok) was tough, well that was paradise compared to this place!
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
From a young boy’s viewpoint this could not get any worse, especially when you were told that you belonged to the devil, and this bullying of me went on for a long time.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
I have beaten people into the ground and the more they cry the more of a beating I gave them. If they don’t cry, I come off, if they cry then I will beat them and beat them and beat them.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
From spending ten years in hell and coming to this regime of kindness was a shock. It was so much of a shock, it was unbelievable. I was like an untamed animal, I couldn’t accept it and I just wouldn’t accept it.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
I dived out of the office and I was gone … hitting these fields like a mad March hare. This wasn’t Born Free, it was RUN FREE!
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
All these do-gooders make it sound like you just have to repent and off you go to heaven, but what about all the atrocities the Catholic religion did to us? Who pays for that! They just took over our lives!!
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
Religion to me was only something to be used and abused, as it had done nothing for me other than give me pain. Religion for me was a method used to gain an extra bottle of wine or a nice meal.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
With regards pedophilia I have always looked on it as that … pedophilia. I thought that one religion is no different to the other and I am now truthfully beginning to think that.
— Stephen Richards, Harry's Fight: Harry Marsden - From Catholic Care Home Abuse To Gangster To Good Fellow
When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.
— Toni Morrison, God Help the Child
People ask, how can a person abuse a child? I ask, how can so many 'good' people not do anything about it?
— Adrianne Simeone
Once upon a time, “that woman” seemed more comfortable with herself. Once upon a time, “that woman” appreciated a slimmer physique and relaxed into natural poses that felt less rehearsed. Once upon a time, “that woman” matched the path she had laid out for herself. Her closed eyes now threatened to open at any second, her tight skin bursting with the artificial flavors and toxins she had been assured were good for her. “That woman” had surrendered herself to anything that would make her path clear. “That woman” expected everyone to buy into the lies that she did. Her self-worth depended on it. So would mine.
— Cherry Tigris, Toilet Paper People: no ONE is perfect
The Persian rug served as their country. The brawnier toilet paper people opted to live in its jade green jungles while the more sensitive and reflective toilet paper people preferred hiding in its opal cream sky. They were so light. No one would ever be able to tell that they had lived there.
— Cherry Tigris, Toilet Paper People: no ONE is perfect
Children are better to starve than forced into prostitution.
— M. T. Panchal, Karma and Redemption
You know what happens to me!
— Satoshi Kon, Opus
Still on speaking terms with the Toilet Paper People, they consented to a box full of Legos that overnight manifested itself into a recording studio. I quickly remembered the power of my hands, my imagination, my will, and my conscience. These were tools I would never let myself get bored with. I would find myself in Blue Ocean Strategy and in other defining ways.
— Cherry Tigris, Toilet Paper People: no ONE is perfect
There is an intergenerational reoccurrence rate of 30% in incest.
— G. Pirooz Sholevar, Textbook of Family and Couples Therapy: Clinical Applications
My view is that the false memory campaign is a spent force. It failed to realise its key goals, failed to renew itself and has largely faded away. Of course, the false memory campaign has left behind the sedimentation of doubt and disbelief that we will have to keep chipping away at. However it is important to recognise that we are witnessing an increasing, not decreasing, number of investigations and prosecutions for cases of organised and ritual abuse. Adults and children who disclose sexual abuse are more likely to be believed now than they were ten or twenty years ago, and that includes victims who describe organised and ritual abuse.Source: Interview with Lynn Schirmir
— Michael Salter
Are Child Molesters Really Just Victims Themselves? "All victims are offenders," one professional challenged me at a conference, "and all offenders are victims. How does your work address that?"My work doesn't address that because I don't believe there's any evidence for that assertion. Obviously, not all victims are offenders, but it is also likely that most offenders weren't victims. The studies that find a high proportion of child molesters who were victims of child sexual abuse themselves are almost always based on self-report, and even there, study results differ dramatically. Studies show the number of child molesters who were themselves molested as children ranges from 22 percent in some studies to 82 percent in others.[101]
— Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
Some mental healthcare workers are aware of clients with high needs, such as dissociative disorders and personality disorders, who have histories of sexual abuse (contact offences), usually from early childhood, involving two or more adults acting together and multiple child victims (Gold et al., 1996; McClellan et al., 1995; Middleton & Butler, 1998). This has been defined as “organised abuse” (Bibby, 1996; La Fontaine, 1993). Excluded from this definition arecases where a child is sexually abused by multiple perpetrators who are unaware of one another, such as survival sex amongst homeless youths, or where abuse is limited to a single household or family and there are no extra-familial victims (La Fontaine, 1
— Michael Salter
While some accused and convicted child molesters have inappropriately influenced the media, the public, and many in the clinical and legal professions by claiming that traumatic amnesia does not occur in child sexual abuse, workers in the field of trauma psychology have accumulated solid empirical evidence over the past 100 years that it does occur and is common. Its existence and natural history are documented throughout the clinical literature. from:Traumatic amnesia: The evolution of our understanding from a clinical and legal perspective, Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, Volume 4, Issue 2, 1997
— Charles L. Whitfield
The Persian rug served as their country with people living injade green jungles and others living in an opal cream sky.They were so light. No one would ever be able to tell thatthey had lived there.
— Cherry Tigris
In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
You're a survivor because every day you make a choice not to be governed by their harsh words or actions. No one has the right to take away your happiness
— Assunta Harris, A Sheep Amongst Wolves
The child who attends school does not remember the abuse that happens at home or via the family
—  those memories are held in another part of the child's mind. The child does not even remember abuse that happened the preceding night.
Many ritually abusive cults deliberately divide the personality system down the middle of the head, making sure that there is no communication between the two sides. “Left side" parts might be instructed to speak to no one other than the perpetrators.
— Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
The literature on ritualistic abuse suggests that ritualistic sexual practices with young children are a characteristic of particularly abusive groups, and that such practices typically occur alongside a diverse range of other abusive practices, such as child prostitution and the manufacture of child abuse images. One of the shortcomings of the available literature, however, is the general presumption (implicit or explicit) that abusive groups are motivated by a religious or spiritual conviction. In clinical and research literature, abusive groups are generally referred to as 'cults', and 'cult abuse' is a term that has been used interchangeably with 'ritual abuse'." p38
— Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse
If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.
— Edna O'Brien
As in so many cases of sexual abuse within the family, it is much more complicated than had it been done by a stranger.
— Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness
While my sister and I were reminded we did not cause this pain, it was knowing that because we broke our silence about what had been done to us, our parents were hurting. That knowledge was hard on us.
— Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness
An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question “Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?” These “witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35]
— Ross Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children
Ethan didn't mind his blood being taken - he just disliked the fact that it had to be sucked through a needle in order to do it.
— Belinda G. Buchanan, Seasons of Darkness
Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.
— Alice  Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries
Always find the funny.
— Amy Susan Crohn, Dying to Live: Running Backwards Through Cancer, Lupus and Chronic Illness