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Humiliation is a wounding of dignity and pride

• Humiliate: Make someone feel ashamed and foolish by injuring their dignity and pride. Oxford Dictionary
• Humiliation: To reduce to a lower position in one’s own eyes or others’ eyes. Merriam Webster
• Humiliation is the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honor or dignity. Evelin Lindner
• Humiliation is the result of the degradation of an individual’s pride or dignity. It can invoke strong feelings of embarrassment and shame. Different individuals cope with humiliations in a different manner. Violent reactions are extremes, but not very uncommon. Dr Prem Jagyasi
• Embarrassment,  Shame,  Guilt,  Shyness,  Fear, Dignity,  Pride

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Humiliation is closely related to shame

• Pride attaches undue importance to the superiority of one’s status in the eyes of others; And shame is fear of humiliation at one’s inferior status in the estimation of others. When one sets his heart on being highly esteemed, and achieves such rating, then he is automatically involved in fear of losing his status. Lao Tzu
• Shame is closely related to guilt, but there is a key qualitative difference. No audience is needed for feelings of guilt, no one else need know, for the guilty person is his own judge. Not so for shame. The humiliation of shame requires disapproval or ridicule by others. If no one ever learns of a misdeed there will be no shame, but there still might be guilt. Of course, there may be both. The distinction between shame and guilt is very important, since these two emotions may tear a person in opposite directions. The wish to relieve guilt may motivate a confession, but the wish to avoid the humiliation of shame may prevent it. Paul Ekman
• Shame: A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour. Oxford Dictionary
• Suffering is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self- pity, shame, humiliation, and dread. Michael Pollan
• The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone. Milan Kundera
• Shame

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Humiliation is sometimes seen as worse than death

• Flaws would not only bring death but, far worse, humiliation. William Goldman
• Death

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The fear of humiliation is a powerful motivator of behaviour and can be a killer of dreams

• The fear of humiliation appears to be one of the most powerful motivators in individual and collective human behavior. Donald Klein
• Of all the forces that shape human behavior, fear of humiliation is among the most powerful. The most common fear is not of illness or accident, but public speaking; soldiers will march into certain doom rather than be branded cowards. Many clients tell me they prefer lives of quiet desperation to the possible embarrassment of trying and failing to realize their heart’s desire. Harriet Lerner
• Dreams

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Make yourself immune from humiliation

• There’s absolutely no way you can feel the freedom to embarrass and humiliate yourself unless you have finally recognized that your identity is in someone other than yourself. Tullian Tchividjian
• The truly humble person cannot be humiliated. Donald Klein

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No-one can humiliate you without your consent

• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Eleanor Roosevelt
• To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can cause us to feel humiliation or shame without our consent. Conversely, withdrawing our consent can end shame-based pain and paralysis immediately. That’s because the real cause of humiliation isn’t being judged or attacked by others, it’s living in any way that conflicts with your real values. Martha Beck

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Align your actions with your convictions

• If your behavior violates your own moral standards, humiliation is a natural consequence. There are two strategies for avoiding this. Strategy number one is obvious: Don’t do anything you think is wrong or fail to do anything you consider morally necessary. I’m guessing you’re a well-meaning person who’s trying to follow the rules, but if you’re having persistent trouble “being good” or if your shame is triggered because of what you are rather than what you do, adopt strategy number two: Stop trying to change your behavior; instead, rethink your beliefs. Martha Beck

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Open Up

• Once your beliefs are congruent with your actions, the next step toward banishing humiliation is openness. Starting with a person who feels safe and nonjudgmental, raise the very conversational topics you’ve always avoided out of embarrassment. Talk, write, shout, laugh, or cry out loud about whatever humiliates you most. Martha Beck
• Openness

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Use humour to take your humiliations with grace

• Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us. Paul Murray
• The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation. Anne Rice
• Humour

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Learn humility by accepting humiliations cheerfully

• We learn humility through accepting humiliations cheerfully. Mother Teresa
• Many of those who are humiliated are not humble. Some react to humiliation with anger, others with patience, and others with freedom. The first are culpable, the next harmless, the last just. Bernard of Clairvaux
• The truly humble person cannot be humiliated. Donald Klein
• Acceptance

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Prefer to be yourself, even at the cost of ridicule

• I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence. Frederick Douglass

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Don’t let the fear of humiliation make you play it safe

• About the process of growing up … What follows is tragic. We stop risking for fear of making mistakes, fear of not fitting in, fear of being embarrassed or humiliated by saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Our instinctive joy and boundless enthusiasm are replaced by playing it safe and looking good. Our spontaneity deserts us, and with it much of our natural creativity. Predictability replaces passion. We learn to reveal very little of who we really are and what we really feel. We sell the richness of our passionate birthright for the security of this burdensome thing called our ‘image’. It weighs us down like a suit of medieval armor, restricting our every move, sapping our vitality and aliveness. We wander through life on automatic pilot, controlled by the need to live up to the false image that we invented.  Robert White
• The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. Ted Hughes
• With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure, no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. William James
• Risk taking

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Realise the mediocre often try to ridicule those that stand above

• Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities. Oscar Wilde
• Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander. Victor Hugo

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Turn your humiliations into art

• Art is born of humiliation. W. H. Auden
• A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. Jorge Luis Borges
• Art

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Robert J. Sternberg’s tips for handling humiliation

• Realize you are not alone. If you can find people who have had a similar crisis to your own, talk to them.
• You have to be resilient, not just smart.
• Learn from the experience.
• Seek out a support network to help you move on.
• Use any downtime you have to do something you really enjoy.
• Think twice before striking back. Your cause may be just. But the more relevant question is whether plotting your revenge is the best use of your time, energy, reputation, and likely, money. Wouldn’t it be wiser to focus on plotting a new future for yourself?
• Don’t hide. You need to affirm for people, and perhaps for yourself, who you are and what you stand for. And you need to show people that the crisis has not destroyed you…
• View the crisis as an opportunity. For example, you can use it as an opportunity to pursue something you love.
• Move on. Don’t wallow in your humiliation. Plan for the future.

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Walk away

• One way to immediately handle humiliation is to say nothing, walk away and, though you’re dying a thousand deaths inside, ignore it. This is the “less said the better” approach. If the moment is over as soon as it happens there’s nothing for future public examination. Though your audience may generate a healthy dose of gossip, if you ignore it the moment dies on the vine and has the effect of never having happened. Jean Sidden

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Respond logically

• Logically responding to your humiliator’s confrontation is another possible alternative to reacting with anger. If you genuinely take a moment and let them know how much you appreciate their sharing their feelings and that you’ll be happy to consider the issues they’ve presented it may be such an unexpected response that the audience will walk away in admiration of your good sense. Jean Sidden
• Logic

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Use humour

• Another approach, if you still have your wits about you, is humor. Making a joke and getting a laugh from the audience is a possible way to diffuse the situation and give you that last word we all hope for. Even something as simple as a heartfelt thank you to the humiliator can break the tension. Jean Sidden
• Humour

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Spiritual growth is to be grateful even for humiliations

• Part of growing up spiritually is learning to be grateful for all things, even our difficulties, disappointments, failures and humiliations. Mike Aquilina
• Spirituality,  Gratitude

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Humiliation can have a positive aspect

• The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation. Simone Weil
• Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification. John Donne

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To humiliate others should never be seen as a sign of honor

• It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings. Mahatma Gandhi
• Honor

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Don’t be silent when others are humiliated

• I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Elie Wiesel
• Silence

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Use words to build up; not to humiliate

• Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble. Yehuda Berg
• Be impeccable with your word,  Encouragement

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Don’t use humiliation to try to make children do better

• Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better? Jane Nelson
• Raising children

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Don’t use humour to humiliate others

• In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour. Henri Bergson
• Humour

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If you must humiliate your enemies, do it in a positive way

• To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is the sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue. Geoerge Eliot
• Enemies

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• With publicity comes humiliation. Tama Janowitz
• Gym should be illegal. It’s humiliating. Laurie Halse Anderson
• To write is a humiliation. Edward Dahlberg
• Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering. Becca Fitzpatrick

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Thoughts on ridicule

• Ridicule dishonors a man more than dishonor does. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule and congratulating ourselves on their defects. William Hazlitt
• I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. Baruch Spinoza
• When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him. Thomas Szasz
• Ridicule is a weak weapon when pointed at a strong mind; but common people are cowards and dread an empty laugh. Martin Tupper
• Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us. Thomas Jefferson
• Ridicule is like a wolf: it only destroys those who fear it.
• I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence. Frederick Douglass
• The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule. Miguel de Unamuno
• Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool. Charles Simmons
• When a man curls his lip, when he uses ridicule, when he grows angry, you have touched a raw nerve in domination. Sheila Rowbotham
• Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. John Stuart
• I have learned never to ridicule any man’s opinion, however strange it may seem. Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.
• Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Saul Alinsky
• Ridicule is the best test of truth. Lord Chesterfield
• Ridicule is the language of the devil. Thomas Carlyle
• Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend. Samuel Johnson
• Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth. William Warburton
• Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life. Joseph Addison
• Man learns more readily and remembers more willingly what excites his ridicule than what deserves esteem and respect. Horace
• It is easy for a man who sits idle at home, and has nobody to please but himself, to ridicule or censure the common practices of mankind. Samuel Johnson

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More thoughts on humiliation

• Humiliation – The harder you try, the dumber you look. Larry Kersten
• The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps. James Gilligan
• Persistent humiliation robs you of the vantage of rebellion. Silver
• The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. Robert I. Sutton
• When you dismiss my story, you dismiss who I am; you diminish me. Leland R. Beaumont
• The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful. Carson McCullers
• Your worst humiliation is only someone else’s momentary entertainment. Karen Crockett
• One man’s transparency is another’s humiliation. Gerry Adams
• There is no humiliation more abusive than hunger. Pranab Mukherjee

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• In golf humiliations are the essence of the game. Alistair Cooke
• The best thing you have going for you is your willingness to humiliate yourself. Greg Kinnear

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