Wit & Attitude Quote by Kate Millett

Hell, here, isn’t theological; it’s bureaucratic. Millett’s line lands like a field report from inside an institution that knows how to win without ever looking like it’s fighting. “I saw hell” gives you the raw, eyewitness heat of trauma, then the second sentence snaps into strategy: “divided and conquered” names the hospital as a political actor, not a neutral place of care. The adverb “pretty successfully” is the killer touch - dry, almost offhand, a shrug over catastrophe. It signals that the cruelty wasn’t a glitch or a few bad apples; it was an operating system.

The intent is twofold: to testify and to indict. Millett, a feminist activist who wrote openly about mental health and psychiatric confinement, is pointing at the way hospitals can fracture people into manageable parts: patients separated from allies, from credibility, from their own narratives. Divide a person from their support network; divide their behavior from their reasons; divide their identity into diagnoses; divide dissent into “symptoms.” Once split up, you can “conquer” with policies, paperwork, locked doors - all while insisting it’s for the patient’s good.

Subtextually, it’s also about power laundering. The hospital doesn’t need to argue; it can reclassify. For an activist - especially a woman whose anger could be medicalized as instability - that’s a special kind of terror: being stripped of political meaning and turned into a case file. Millett’s brevity is the point. Hell doesn’t require a long description when the mechanism is already familiar.