Quotes About Oppression

If you want a free society, teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all, encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves.

Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.

Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

History shows that attacks on general freedoms often begin with an attack on the freedom of a minority. It teaches us that we should never allow a government to divide and rule. An attack on one is an attack on all.

As history teaches us, freedom is never forgotten by those who have known it, and then lost it.

The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.

There's no winning for us. We're screwed. We were born into a system we don't agree with, and we got caught. Here, out there, it doesn't matter. There's nothing left for us.

It seems to me [he wrote in early April] that in no other war in history has the issue been so distinctly drawn between the forces of arbitrary oppression on the one side and, on the other, those conceptions of individual liberty, freedom, and dignity, under which we have been raised in our great Democracy….

London—the king's men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, "panting for an explosion.

only low men, the lowest, tormented the weaker things in their control.

We're trying to break yokes. You're trying to make one for yourself.

Es curioso que la iglesia católica aliada de Hitler, de Franco, inventora de las cruzadas y de la Inquisición, protectora de los peores dictadores, grite que sin la religión, el mundo estaría peor.

Nobody likes being exploited, unless they're unaware of it, and many aren't aware of it because they believe that's how life is and you can't change it.

The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules. Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the breadwinner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.

Finally, Madison dismissed religion as an effective restraint on oppressive mass behavior: "The inefficacy of this restraint on individuals is well known," and experience shows that religion "has been much oftener a motive to oppression than a restraint from it.

a majority when united by a common interest or passion cannot be restrained from oppressing the minority, what remedy can be found in a republican Government, where the majority must ultimately decide?

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Economic bullying takes many forms but almost always preys on individuals and families that have little or no power and are at the mercy of those who do.

Don't separate race from class. Racial discrimination is aggravating class divides, and wider inequality is worsening racial divides.

when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they're told the First Amendment doesn't apply.