Emotional Desensitization Quotes

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.

atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

My father was a doctor so I was around death all my life. So, I was very used to it because he was a f-king doctor.

Pity drowns in numbers.

And we are a people without tears. The things that moved our parents do not move us at all.

Repetition is not repetition, ... The same action makes you feel something completely different by the end

Every desire bears its death in its very gratification. Curiosity languishes under repeated stimulants, and novelties cease to excite and surprise, until at length we cannot wonder even at a miracle.

I was a very sensitive kid who then had to condition myself to desensitize.

I've been in pain for so long now I'm just used to it.

I was at the front for thirteen months, and by the end of that time the sharpest perceptions had become dulled, the greatest words mean.

Learning is to discover that something is possible. We are using most of our energies for self-destructiv e games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy.

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.

I couldn't stop bawling, watching the towers come down. it was a terrible thing to happen. And a terrible thing to realize that I don't sit though the nigh crying when such horrors happen all the time.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

After awhile, your, your cheap talk don't even cause me pain, so let your bullets fly like rain.

Sometimes, we get numb to the fact that people get sent away. We don't see where they are; we say they are 'doing time,' and you really don't know what that is.

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.

When the heart no longer feels the truth of hell, the gospel passes from good news to simply news

Nothing has saddened me so much in life as the hardness of heart of educated people.

All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.

What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.

The awakenings of remorse, virtuous shame and indignation, the glow of moral approbation if they do not lead to action, grow less and less vivid every time they occur, till at length the mind grows absolutely callous.