Quotes About Oppression

Another fugitive, writing in the 1820s compared the sight of the whipped slave's black to that of 'a field lately ploughed' and proposed with scalding irony that 'if it were not for the stripes on my back' he would bequent his own skin to the government to be used as parchment wrapping for tht 'charter of American liberty' the US Constitution.

Cutting to the heart of the matter, Lincoln made the irrefutable point: "People of any color seldom run, unless there be something to run from." Two SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS 1.

And yet vile as it was, the fugitive slave law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists, both black and white, because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet.

Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of the white man's soul.

The keystone of slavery in its new guise was the system of convict labor, which entrapped hundreds of thousands of black men in a permanent state of terror and involuntary servitude, and which kept the entire black community in a state of quiet, fearful resignation.

First, if Rice had preached to his all-white Texas audience in 1930 against racial injustice or oppression he would have been castigated as a modernist, a radical socialist, or a social gospel do-gooder, and lost all his influence in the fundamentalist movement, most or all of his friends, and maybe even his life.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Like a horrible nightmare, the abrogation of equal rights weighs upon us all, but especially upon those Jews who, like me, had surrendered themselves to the dream of assimilation.

People who are in a position of power like to throw their weight around, and that becomes abuse.

I think the reason why people love 'Downton Abbey' is because all the characters are given the same weight. Some are nice, some are not, but it has nothing to do with class or oppressors versus the oppressed.

The weight that hangs upon our eyelids - is of lead.

All nations that throw their military weight around, occupying neighboring lands and treating the residents with callous and humiliating disregard, are already sliding towards the dark possibilities in human nature.

Presidential elections and the voter experience have long been fraught for black people. From racist poll taxes to made-up literacy tests to the egregious rollback of voting rights over the past 50 years, American democracy has, at times, felt like a weird and failed social experiment.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

Nowhere is Universalism welcomed and encouraged by a people; everywhere governments have forced and are forcing Universalism upon unwilling and resistant subjects.

I look at my people, and I look at those who control them - the political elite. And the sad thing is that the elites are just not interested in the welfare of the people.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

My father constantly reminded me that he named me after Angela Yvonne Davis, a scholar and activist who was well known for her work in tandem with the Black Panther Party. That felt like a purposeful, beckoning call to engage in strategic resistance and to fight for the oppressed.

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

Too often, we say that the Left is wrong but well-intentioned. Some are. But most simply want government to control other people's lives, and they believe in Stalinistic methods to achieve that goal.

It seems to me virtually any ideology, no matter how intrinsically benign, can be used to oppress. And any group with power, no matter how well-meaning, ultimately corrupts and ends up exploiting its advantage to some extent.

I've wept for Haiti a thousand times over the years since my first trip during the Duvalier reign.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.