Daily Inspiration Quote by Kate Millett

“It was horrifying” lands like an eyewitness report, not an abstract critique, and Kate Millett is too savvy to let horror stay private. The clipped sentences mimic the shock of encountering institutional cruelty up close: the more ordinary the phrasing, the less room the reader has to hide behind euphemism. “You wouldn’t believe” is doing double duty. It’s an invitation into her moral certainty, but it’s also an indictment of a public trained not to believe people who report abuse in psychiatric settings, prisons, or any “care” system that runs on secrecy.

The most pointed turn is the shift from what “they” did to what the patients did “to themselves.” Millett isn’t blaming; she’s exposing how power works when it sinks in deep enough that coercion no longer needs a guard’s hand. “Withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds” reads like compassion on the surface, but the subtext is political: isolation is manufactured. When you strip people of agency, privacy, and dignity, self-harm becomes less a personal pathology than a predictable language of protest, escape, or numbness.

Context matters because Millett’s activism treated the personal as evidence, not anecdote. She’s trying to make the invisible legible: not “mental illness” as a scary other, but institutional treatment as a social decision with casualties. The line insists that what happens “there” is not an exception; it’s a system doing exactly what it was built to do, just out of sight.