Quotes About Oppression

As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression.

This hand, unfriendly to tyrants,Seeks with the sword placid repose under liberty.

Whenever a time comes that the justice overwhelms and overcomes cruelty, it is prohibited to form negative conjectures and opinions about anyone, except when one knows it about him. But whenever a time comes that cruelty and oppression overwhelms the (quantum of) justice, then one must not have good opinions about the beneficence of a person, till such time he knows it(for sure).

But Israel's might is useless in a struggle that is not about winning territory but securing democratic rights for all. This is why opposition to the grim realities must be coupled with a battle of ideas in which walls and checkpoints provide no defense. Furthermore, it is why the struggle must take a moral form that offers Israel no excuses for its oppressive measures.

In all their colonies, wealth, power, and beauty were the property of the white elite and the lighter-skinned children of intermarriages and illegal liaisons between white male colonizers and local women.

In understanding the widespread use of skin-lightening creams among black women in South Africa, the USA, the UK, and many other societies, from Brazil and the Philippines to Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and the Caribbean, the role of white colonialism by the British, Spanish, and Portuguese cannot be underestimated.

She remarks, in particular, how white people simply fail to understand how they might be complicit, unwittingly, in shoring up structures of white dominance.

the sins of slavery are given short shrift.

When the state is not kind, then the people are fodder.

across the aeons and the global distances what all the peoples of the world really have in common is so many similar ways of doing humiliating and painful things to each other.

Instantly two of the girls seized her and, as she involuntarily opened her lips to scream, one thrust a ball of clean rags into her mouth, thrusting it in so far that it effectually gagged her, nor could she expel the ball from her mouth.

Don't it give you the goose pimples when you realize that white people can kill us and get away with it? Just think of it! We are walkin' targets everywhere we go—on the subway, in the street, everywhere.

The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be.

The slavery debate alerts us to self-justifying tendencies at work in how we use the Bible. Whenever our interpretation leads to injustice, oppression, or structural violence, then the very heart of the Bible is repudiated. Such views are anti-biblical, no matter what texts they cite.

Women are not allowed truth, not allowed speaking roles, not allowed to be precise.

We are taught to think ourselves ugly. Eyes are an assaulted sense. We are taught to behave by spankings and whippings. Touch is an assaulted sense. We are taught we should not smell, or we smell wrong. Smell is an assaulted sense. We listen to songs that call us 'hos and tell us how to give blow jobs. Hearing is an assaulted sense. Taste, not so much.

What I liked least about the Plantation Club? They plastered caricatures of us, drawings of darkies with protruding lips and gawking eyes on every matchbook, napkin, menu, and newspaper advertisement associated with or in the Plantation Club. Why? I suspect they hoped their filthy-as-homemade-sin visual lies would inoculate white folk from the shock of Black beauty. That left me, and many of the rest of the entertainers, exodusing for the inner sanctum of drunk.

And for an insane moment she thought, this is no different from normality, just women existing and surviving, this is what happens to women who don't fit into a world created by men.

I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain't safe in a family of men. But I never thought I'd have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me.