Quotes About Oppression

Family separations were probably the most brutal, heartless aspect of American slavery, although many slaveholders claimed that blacks, being less than fully human, weren't particularly bothered by it.

anything was better than the horrible state of things below. I remember very well going to the hatchway and putting my head down, when I was oppressed by nausea, and always being relieved immediately. It was an effectual emetic.

What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.

The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of "us"—those who are holding rights at the time.

The wrong people have all the rights.

Our regime," Franco announced grandly, "is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.

There are two ways of being a prophet. One is to tell the enslaved that they can be free. It is the difficult path of Moses. The second is to tell those who think they are free that they are in fact enslaved. This is the even more difficult path of Jesus.

With the exception of Leviticus and Numbers, written by the priestly classes, most of the Bible is written by or about people who are occupied, enslaved, poor or disenfranchised in some way!

The language of patriarchy is always a noble or macho language of patriotism and freedom. Men (and their female echoes) are always speaking it, but the amazing thing is that anyone is still willing to believe it. But fortunately the poor, the oppressed and marginalized, and especially women are beginning to trust their natural and truly religious instincts.

They look like the oppressors, but have no doubt they are really the oppressed.

The lie was that we believed that we believed all people were created equal! What made us think we were this great free society? Those at the top believed it then, and we at the top believe it two hundred years later. That's the power of myth.

The global issues of injustice, the culture of death that we are a part of, the sufferings of the oppressed, all of these demand t hat we bring the Voice of the Spirit to these well-denied and disguised situations, and not just our own tiny judgments or anger. This i the difference between true Gospel and mere political correctness or Band-Aid liberal responses. We are holding out for the great Gospel...

My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.

If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.

They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes.

Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it

Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!

We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.

He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear

America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.) Granny

He looked round the street and saw a sign on a building: THIS PROPERTY IS MANAGED BY THE SOUTH SIDE REAL ESTATE COMPANY. He had heard that Mr. Dalton owned the South Side Real Estate Company, and the South Side Real Estate Company owned the house in which he lived. He paid eight dollars a week for one rat-infested room.

They wouldn't let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain't fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn't want to kill.

Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this. Yes; he would send the kidnap note. He would jar them out of their senses. When

It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind.