Quotes About Oppression

You can't build a revolution with no education. Jomo Kenyatta did this in Africa, and because the people were not educated, he became as much an oppressor as the people he overthrew.

Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

I feel lucky. I grew up in an open-minded, multi-cultural community in West Vancouver in Canada. There were people who had escaped some kind of oppression. Some of them were first-generation immigrants, others were one or two generations back.

Chinese citizens have never had the right to really express their opinions; in the constitution it says you can, but in the real world it is more dangerous. In the west people think it's a right they're born with. Here it's a right given by the government, and one that's not really practised.

Only a free West can help the prisoners of today's left- and right-wing dictatorships.

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.

Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

We have to stop letting people come in here and make millionaires and billionaires of themselves off of West Virginia while West Virginia remains poor.

My grandparents left the Pale of Settlement at the border of western Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children in America.

From before I was born, we Arabs have been caught between two forces that, seemingly, cannot be defeated: our ruthless dictators, who oppress and humiliate us, and the cynical western powers, who would rather see us ruled by criminals loyal to them than have democratically elected leaders accountable to us.

For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.

Today the Western powers and media want to domesticate us like sheep, to keep us tame and domesticated.

Women were once considered chattel, and slavery was regarded as sanctioned in the Bible. However, western society grew to recognize that neither was just.

When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.

We're used to saying that women in other cultures are oppressed, but the question that I had when making the film was: Isn't the objectification of a woman's body that we often see in Western culture another kind of oppression?

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.

Historically, foreign powers have always been the ones to keep Latin nations divided.

You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.

The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance.

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.