Quotes About Oppression

The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless (they were not oppressed, they had simply not yet emerged).

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism.

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

Openly questioning the way the world works and challenging the power of the powerful is not an activity customarily rewarded.

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

Power wears out those who do not have it.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

Authority founded on injustice is never of long duration.

When you have a person in power who punishes people for speaking their mind, it's truly dangerous.

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.

It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.

The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

Men who use terrorism as a means to power, rule by terror once they are in power.

The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual.

The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.