Stockholm Syndrome Quotes

“And it's hard to hate someone once you understand them.”
― Lucy Christopher, Stolen

“I've been doing this a long time- manipulating people to get my way. That's why you think you love me. Because I've broken you down and built you back up to believe it. It wasn't an accident. Once you leave this behind..... you'll see that. -Caleb”
― CJ Roberts, Seduced in the Dark

“Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting--or even demanding--their own enslavement.”
― Larken Rose

“In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“You don’t stare the devil in the eyes and come out without some of his sin. You can’t beat the devil without becoming like him.”
― Nina G. Jones, Take Me with You

“When there is inconsistency in belief and action (such as being violated by someone who is supposed to love you) our mind has to make an adjustment so that thought and action are aligned. So sometimes the adjustment that the mind makes is for the victim to bring her or his behavior in line with the violator, since the violator cannot be controlled by the victim. Our greatest source of survival is to adapt to our environment. So increasing emotional intimacy with a person who is forcing physical intimacy makes sense in our minds. It resolves cognitive dissonance.”
― Rosenna Bakari, Tree Leaves: Breaking The Fall Of The Loud Silence

“Sometimes I hate him. When he does the dishes, he shakes off each one before setting it in the drying rack. Water flies everywhere. A couple of drops always hit me in the face. I have to leave the room to avoid smashing a plate against his head.”
― Tarryn Fisher, Mud Vein

“Her loving hands, soft lips, and perfumed scents were an addiction for which he had no cure.”
― Travis Luedke, The Nightlife: Paris

“The man reeks of mental illness. I can taste his pathology... Goes well with my palette.”
― Juditta Salem

“In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were attached to snare traps around their necks, likely to kill them in the event that the police attempted to storm the bank. The hostages grew increasingly afraid and hostile toward the authorities trying to win their release and even actively resisted various rescue attempts. Afterward they refused to testify against their captors, and several continued to stay in contact with the hostage takers, who were sent to prison. Their resistance to outside help and their loyalty toward their captors was puzzling, and psychologists began to study the phenomenon in this and other hostage situations. The expression of positive feelings toward the captor and negative feelings toward those on the outside trying to win their release became known as Stockholm syndrome.”
― Rachel Lloyd

“What makes the difference between a gang and a state is the belief that there is a difference between a gang and a state.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society's simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves.”
― Natascha Kampusch

“Are we going to go through this every time, really?" Peter tilts his head on an angle. His smile inches up a few degrees. "I want you, Stiles. And from where I’m sitting, it looks like I’ve got you.”
― DiscontentedWinter, Don't Fail Me Now

“Sometimes a night of over-eating leaves you hungry for something you can't name. An emptiness haunted me. An emptiness I didn't have a name for until I met Jeb. Now, I' m starving.”
― Kim Briggs

“Addiction, at its worst, is akin to having Stockholm Syndrome. You're like a hostage who has developed an irrational affection for your captor. They can abuse you, torture you, even threaten to kill you, and you'll remain inexplicably and disturbingly loyal.”
― Anne Clendening, Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

“America's state religion, is patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many of the citizenry that 'treason' is morally worse than murder or rape.”
― William Blum

“Statism is a mental disorder, much akin to Stockholm Syndrome.”
― Dane Whalen

“More often than not, a statist's argument against Anarchism boils down to an unwillingness to take control and responsibility for their own lives, actions, and communities. The sad truth is that the human animal has been domesticated to the point where it actually fears Liberty.”
― Dane Whalen

“Sometimes 'Stockholm' can actually be a compliment: a dream of somewhere bigger, where we can become someone else. Something that we long for but don't quite dare to do.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We are dealing with a genuine Stockholm syndrome on a mass scale - when the hostage becomes the accomplice of the hostage taker - as well as a revolution of the concept of voluntary servitude and master-slave relations. When the entire society becomes an accomplice to those who took it hostage, but just as much when individuals split into, for themselves, hostage and hostage taker.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis

“Can't expect to shut up a sunbeam in a box and not have it dim a little. Hm?”
― Persephone Black, Captive of the Crime Queen

“There's nothing—nothing—more monstrous than that beguiling face Pestilence wears, his golden crown resting proudly on his head.”
― Laura Thalassa, Pestilence

“Is it 'Stockholm syndrome' when your God has never once misguided your steps? I think not! Let the lost ones dart across the darkness, bashing into walls, pretending to love their ways as we delight in obedience to the footsteps of Christ which bring us to freedom. By Faith we wander - not because we are lost, but because we are free.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“What kind of lunatic would come back here once he'd escaped? There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“What to a slave is a square
technically it's perfect.”
― Morgan Parker

“Only with our modern civilization did we find ourselves forcibly inducted into this individual existence. Of course, we fight to retain this 'inalienable' right, and we are naturally driven to win it and defend it at all costs. We demand this freedom, this autonomy, as a fundamental human right and, at the same time, we are crippled by the responsibility that ends up making us detest ourselves as such.
This is what resounds in the complaint of Job. God asks too much: ''What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thy heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle? '
This leaves us subject to a contradictory twofold requirement: to seek an identity by all possible means - by hounding the identities of others or by exploring the networks - and to slough off identity in every possible way, as though it were a burden or a disguise.
It is as though liberty and individuality, from having been a 'natural' state in which one may act freely, had become artificial states, a kind of moral imperative, whose implacable decree makes us hostages to our identities and our own wills.
This is a very particular case of Stockholm Syndrome, since we are here both the terrorist and the hostage. Now, the hostage is by definition the unexchangeable, accursed object you cannot be rid of because you don't know what to do with it.
The situation is the same for the subject: as hostage to himself, he doesn't know how to exchange himself or be rid of himself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“PhD students are the academic world's version of indentured slaves. The only reason they get away with it is because the students all have Stockholm Syndrome, plus they're under the misapprehension that a PhD is actually worth something.”
― R.A. Spratt, Big Trouble

“I must be absolutely mad to attend lunch with these fae princes. One imprisoned me, one threatened me, one tried to eat me, and one, I suspect, wanted to do very indecent things to me.”
― Elizabeth Helen, Bonded by Thorns

“Will had been trapped in the car so long with Amanda that he was worried he was going to develop Stockholm syndrome.”
― Karin Slaughter, Fallen