Judith Butler Quotes

There is a fetishization of victimization in our culture. And I just am not interested in victimhood.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

I can't discriminate? Oh, that's ripe, coming from a straight white man. What's the matter, baby doesn't feel like he belongs? Well why don't you try a place that was set up just for you? Like the world!

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

Throughout the ages, governments never failed to take advantage of anti-Semitism and the Jewish situation. While the Jews sought tolerance, they were met with intolerance, used as political and religious pawns, caught in the middle, which usually resulted in their becoming victims.

I would like to share with you my plan to destroy America…. I would invest in ethnic identity and victimology. I would get them to think that their lack of success was only the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry.

I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial.

As a woman, as a Jew, as a lesbian, as a labor leader in a time of great anti-union animus, I know that other people project their biases on me. But it is nothing like the experience of our African-American brothers and sisters, especially black and brown men and boys.

Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.

If you're anything other than a white, cisgender, able-bodied dude, people are going to project narratives, imagery, and context onto you that you might not necessarily see for yourself.

Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.

The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.

My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.

The Jew is upset because the nations of the world - the United Nations - lash him, brand him as racist and evil, hate him and openly demonstrate their desire to destroy him.

Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.

The metaphor of Exodus is one that has dogged the Jews from the outset. Their very success attracts resentment.

I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.