dehumanize
See also: de-humanize
English
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editdehumanize (third-person singular simple present dehumanizes, present participle dehumanizing, simple past and past participle dehumanized)
- (transitive) To take away humanity; to remove or deny human qualities, characteristics, or attributes; to impersonalize.
- 1919, James Hastings, John Alexander Selbie, Louis Herbert Gray, Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics: Picts-Sacraments, page 535:
- In its consistently logical form Quietism makes communion between man and God an impossibility by annulling the distinction between them, ultimately reducing God to a vague and empty abstraction, and dehumanizing man.
- 1968, Stewart L. Udall, 1976: Agenda for Tomorrow, page 3:
- Yet we are dismayed by the failures and forces that dehumanize and defeat the finest dreams and plans of this generation.
- 1999, Ursula E. Beitter, The New Europe at the Crossroads, page 129:
- To what extent can we stop making the culture of the Other so dehumanized and Satanized as to make the Other fit to be genocidable?
- 2003, Stephen P. Garvey, editor, Beyond Repair? America's Death Penalty, →ISBN, page 141:
- And, in this country, the traditional, ingrained way to dehumanize people, to make both their pain and their individuality irrelevant, is to rely on their race.
- 2022 July 14, Rafqa Touma, “Melbourne woman ‘dehumanised’ by viral TikTok filmed without her consent”, in The Guardian[1]:
- A Melbourne woman says she feels “dehumanised” after being filmed without consent for a “random act of kindness” TikTok that went viral.
- 2023 November 2, David Brooks, “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times”, in The New York Times[2]:
- From this sort of work, we learn to have a contempt for sadism, for anything that dehumanizes, and to have compassion for the everyday people who pay the price for the designs of proud and evil men.
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editto take away humanity
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