Quotes About Oppression

God has always been hard on the poor.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.

The word 'citizen' confers rights, rights that are invisible, that really appear only when they are denied... You live in a racial state that formally denies difference, but in practice avows it, through the barrel of a gun or the conferring of papers.

Racism is not merely about individual chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry. Ruth Glimore reminds us that it is about the ways different groups are 'vulnerable to premature death,' whether at the hands of the state or structures that kill.

The truth would be difficult to speak, but it would be necessary to begin to right the wrongs done to Blacks and Coloureds. Reconciliation would not be a gift, but an 'exchange for truth.' In other words, peace and justice are inseparable from each other.

If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.

Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak.

But racism and inequality would never end if Blacks focused on easing white anxiety.

But the one thing all of the people in the Ape Yard had in common was that they were trapped, caught in that basin of poverty and servitude to Doc Bobo in the hollow, and held in place by the weight of the white structure beyond. For them, escape seemed futile at the outset.

Keep them poor and keep them tired, and they'll never leave." How well he understood his people.

Individual suicide was wasteful, but mass suicide that sent a message of defiance, and that encouraged future generations to fight oppression to the death, was admirable.

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.

On that night he made clear to his secret society that the fundamental conflict of his life was founded on precisely that belief: the white establishment would always keep the common black man down in order to cover their own asses.

My God, John. The king has begun to shoot his subjects.

They kill you before you die...

I'd held my job in the mailroom of a heartless corporation run by sinister men in dark suits for over three months now, and today at lunch my boss' boss had nodded and half-smiled in my direction. My future was looking bright.

I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of some stupefying gastric juice.

The larger the prisoner's pain (the smaller the prisoner's world and therefore by comparison) the larger the torturer's world... pain becomes power... the torturer uses the prisoner's aliveness to crush the things that he lives for.

The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it.

Como él, millares de inocentes en el mundo viajaban en coches oscuros, con los ojos vendados, tragando su propia sangre, hacia un destino inicuo. El destino de la víctima es siempre el mismo: ¡terrible!

There is nothing more base than a certain loathing for the oppressed that goes to great lengths to justify their downtrodden state by pointing to their shortcomings. Not even great and lofty philosophers are entirely free of this failing.

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silent encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.