Quotes About Oppression

Half the country wouldn't have died if the landlords hadn't kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting, evicting, torching cabins…Or if the government at Westminster hadn't thought it the most prudent course of action to sit on their arses and let the Irish starve.

In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.

So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.

THE BALLAD OF READING GOAL: The vilest deeds, like poison weeds,      Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man      That wastes and withers there. Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,      And the Warder is Despair.

Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor.

There is not a single penal institution or reformatory in the United States where men are not tortured "to be made good," by means of the blackjack, the club, the straightjacket, the water-cure, the "humming bird" (an electrical contrivance run along the human body), the solitary, the bullring, and starvation diet. In these institutions his will is broken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the deadly monotony and routine of prison life.

La politique [de la dictature bolchévik] n'est qu'une variante du communisme de guerre de 1920-1921 - avec de plus en plus de guerre (de répression armée) et de moins en moins de communisme. Son égalité est celle d'un pénitencier, sa liberté celle d'un groupe de forçats enchaînés. Pas étonnant que les bolcheviks affirment que la liberté est un préjugé bourgeois.

La raison d'Etat (...) a toujours servi à masquer la tyrannie, l'exploitation et la détermination des dirigeants à prolonger et perpétuer leur domination Emma Goldman, 1935, le communisme n'existe pas en Russie

Suurin osa ihmisistä on pakotettu tekemään asioita joita he vihaavat sekä elämään elämää jota halveksivat. Niin kauan kuin tällainen jatkuu, rikollisuus on välttämätön paha.

To-night I am to be shot because I had once acquired an education.

How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance

The field had to be "cleared of disturbing elements," and the Anarchists were the first to suffer. Since then the persecution of the Anarchists has never ceased.

But as to free speech," he remarked, "that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period. We

So what oppresses and scares us? It is our own thoughts, obviously, What overwhelms people when they are about to leaves friends, family, old haunts and their accustomed way of life? Thoughts.

Here are thieves and robbers and tribunals: and they that are called tyrants, who deem that they have after a fashion power over us, because of the miserable body and what appertains to it. Let us show them that they have power over none.

It is better to live with one free man and to be without fear and free, than to be a slave with many.

But the tyrant will chain …' What? Your legs. 'But he'll cut off …' What? Your head. What is he incapable, then, of chaining up or cutting off? Your power of choice.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community-building. —Philip Gourevitch

Give a man a hoe and he is something to exploit. Give him a book and he is something to fear.

If their way was a blind alley, let us not deny them the longing for liberty and justice which moved them.

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors. They want to retaliate.

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the "free for all." They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society. 29

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.     142