Trigger Warnings Quotes

“Trigger warnings aren't meant for those of us who don't believe in them, just like the Bible wasn't written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need and believe in that safety. Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Few are willing to consider the possibility that trigger warnings might be ineffective, impractical, and necessary for creating safe spaces all at once.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Some suggest that this cocoon mentality is behind recent campus trends such as "trigger warnings" to alert students that a reading or lecture material might be disturbing and "safe spaces" where students can go if they are upset by a campus speaker's message. One safe space, for example, featured coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies, neatly connecting the idea of safe spaces with that of childhood.”
― Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

“Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.
This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.

We all have history. You can think you're over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Trigger warning! What a cool term, a lot of things in life should come with one. Anything unpleasant.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“When you were exposed to darkness so young, it just became something you had to embrace inside yourself. I knew now the only way to not hate myself was to love even the worst parts of myself. After all, they were the parts that had kept me alive.”
― Santana Knox, Empire of Carnage

“...when I want to tell you a story of fiction, all those kind of college students, they think that they have this holding on me, that they say, we don't want to listen to what you are, we want to listen to a little bit of what you are that goes well with what we're not afraid of (not what we are, we don't know who we are)....

But what's most important in our interaction is the word, that the word won't scare us. It can't hurt us in a story, for sure, but we want a word that doesn't scare us. And we are kind of breaking ourself to something that is less and less a persona and more and more kind of a repetitive loop of ever-going forgettable experiences.”
― Etgar Keret

“Our 'sensitivities' are treated as evidence of our incapacity to participate in a grown-up sphere, even as the men angrily lashing out against them are framed as ideological defenders of free speech and the open exchange of ideas.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship