Quotes About Oppression

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood.

The real tragedy of humankind,' Shealtiel used to say, 'is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold their heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.

She didn't believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.)

When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes on of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority's wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the market-dominant minority itself

We are saved not by what we can do or accomplish but by our fealty to revolt, our steadfastness to the weak, the poor, the marginalized, and those who endure oppression. We must stand with them against the powerful. If we remain true to these moral imperatives, we win. And I am enough of an idealist to believe that the struggle to live the moral life is worth it. Chris Hedges, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

It's not privilege when it makes you feel awful, when it cripples your ability to do good things in the world.

Because if it moved faster it would be fascism, Jackson, and we've come damned close to that and would rather not.

Witnesses like me are invisible to police anyway. Just another fat brown woman with too many dogs. They didn't want my opinion.

The Watcher lived for one thing and one thing only; fighting for the oppressed.

In Israel's Scriptures, God's concern is not restricted to insiders: it extends to strangers, to slaves, to women, and to any who are oppressed, for we are all children of God.

The question of paying taxes is a valid one today, particularly for people living under occupation or under an unjust regime. It was a valid one in ancient Israel as well—how much does one go along with the emperor, and when must one resist?

from loneliness, from poverty, from oppression. We are all in need of some form of salvation. Indeed, the idea of salvation for most of the Scriptures of Israel is not about spiritual matters, but physical ones: the Passover, the setting of the Passion narrative, is about salvation from slavery. God hears our cries. And the stories remind us that people, still, cry out to be saved. Will our cries be heard by others? Will we hear the cries of others? Will God act? Will we?

Salvation means that there is respite from whatever oppresses in the community that hears, and lives, this Gospel.

sorry Sartre, the hell is the bureaucrats .

The Moroccan education system is a crime against the educators .

I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.

Written laws are like spiders' webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

Women out in the village don't talk back to their husbands. It's just a law, when men say something, women should just listen. And you should never talk in a loud voice because a man outside might hear. I made that mistake, but I was lucky. In Tarinkot, a man beat his wife with an ax, and she survived, but her head was split open. Husbands who only use their hands or feet are very kind." -Heela (Gopal's female civilian Afghan respondent)

las pobres gentes, adiestradas en la obediencia por sus antiguos tiranos y por sus recientes libertadores, se alejaron de allí cabizbajas, arrastrando los pies.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.