Desensitization Quotes

“Shame on the misguided, the blinded, the distracted and the divided. Shame. You have allowed deceptive men to corrupt and desensitize your hearts and minds to unethically fuel their greed.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“People should see what goes on. What it really feels like. Because once a trial starts and everyone's watching, both men will stand resolved and stoic. But if they could see this, if they could see what this kind of darkness does to a person, maybe they'd feel it, too. Maybe they wouldn't make excuses anymore. Maybe they wouldn't shrug it off, because, you know, these things happen.”
― T.E. Carter, I Stop Somewhere

“Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements that
plague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,
more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.”
― Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?

“How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue. Wine, when your tongue has been burned clean with lye and water, feels like puddle water in your mouth, while mustard feels like axle-grease, and you can smell crisp, fried bacon, but when you taste it, there is only a feeling of crinkly lard. (from "On The Blue Water", a 1936 essay about fishing)”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A pleasing paradox — The more frequently we contemplate our death, the less dominant its effect in our lives becomes. Like King Mithridates, who used to take small amounts of various poisons to render himself invulnerable to them, so can we diminish the looming shadow of our certain death by welcoming small doses of it – the thought of it- in our daily mental pattern. Paradoxically, it makes life more intense, more valuable, more satisfying.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“John thought about nearly dying in Chicago and
this first time firing a gun, causing a realization to come to him; video games are not accurate depictions of real-world violence.
Were there a few fractured souls who lost their minds to the game and couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what was fake? Sure. But a sane mind could tell, and a sane mind shouldn't be able to kill in cold blood after five hours of Halo.
Those people had an underlying problem before they picked up a controller.”
― Hew J. La France, A F K

“It should come as no surprise that stressful situations become less stressful the more you get used to them. Psychologists call this cue desensitization—the process by which you experience a lower emotional response to a stimulus after repeated exposure to it. It’s the reason that seasoned pros can still perform well in front of thousands of spectators, why public speaking becomes easier and easier, and, ahem, why it only feels kinky the first time you do it. So stop avoiding things that scare you. The goal is to seek out opportunities to experience pressure and confront it head-on.”
― Simon Marshall, The Brave Athlete: Calm the F*ck Down and Rise to the Occasion

“What amounts to a plague of mental illness is now addressed as ‘normal’ rather than as an indication that there is something terrifyingly wrong with our culture. The fact that we no longer understand mental illness as a message – that is, as a nondeclarative communication of an imbalance that requires rectification – not only demonstrates the degree of our emotional illiteracy, but our failure to understand the principle of balance as the axis of all existence.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Today, due to 24/7 media, the internet, and broadcast news, we know more about suffering elsewhere than any previous generation, and yet we are turning our backs to it.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. There are two meanings of the word "nervous," and it is not even a physical superiority to be actually without nerves. It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“I became particularly interested in breaking through the clichés that are most frequently applied to violence, masks that make it palatable to movie or television viewers. I wanted instead to depict murder, violence, and absence of human response in a way that allowed readers, if they were willing to keep their eyes open, to perceive violence not as symbolic, not as meaningful, but as a basic and irrecoverable act-using violence that overflows the boundaries of expectation, violence as a kind of deterritorialization that floods society and leaves it drowning underwater. Violence as insignificant in that it doesn't signify anything. Not violence as glitzily evil and chic, but as neutral and blank and indifferent.”
― Brian Evenson, Altmann's Tongue