Quotes About Oppression

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

Lots of people think I went to prison. I never went to prison. I was in jail without bail.

Prison killed me. It destroyed me.

In prison, you're issued a number of sanitary pads per month. And many times, even when you're issued a number of sanitary pads, the guards will just come in and rip your room apart, rip your locker apart and take them.

I won't perform in Cuba until there's no more Castro and there's a free Cuba. To me, Cuba's the biggest prison in the world, and I would be very hypocritical were I to perform there.

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts.

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

The prison industrial system, things like that are cleverly put in place to attempt to marginalize a certain group of people - and it's not only black, it's replete across the American society.

Attica. The name itself has long signified resistance to prison abuse and state violence.

From kindergarten, I knew that politics is something that you talk about only at home, because if you weren't quiet, your parents might be taken to prison. All Estonian families have these kind of stories.

After the end of slavery, African-American men were arrested in mass, and they were arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering, standing around, vagrancy, or the equivalent of jaywalking - arrested and then sent to prison and then leased to plantations.

When you're poor and black in America, you stand a greater chance of going to prison for something you didn't do.

For me, prison is a necessary step towards achieving the right to self-determination.

Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.

The prisoner never loves his warden, even if he obeys the rules from time to time.

I do not accept being a prisoner of fear. Of Communism, of fascism. That, one can bear. But of one's fear. No. Never.

In so many places in the world, women have been prisoners for so long that they feel they have to scream about their rights. But when you scream, nobody listens to you. Real authority comes when you no longer need to scream - and that's something we women still need to learn.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

Our prisons are very bad. When I was in Ikoyi prison, people were dying every day. They were carrying bodies out of the prison every day.

Prisons are like the concentration camps of our time. So many go in and never come out, and primarily they're black and Latino.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

I surrendered all my privacy to write this book. It was so hard and so painful. I went through so much crazy stuff. But I wanted people to realize that North Koreans are just like them.

When you're accustomed to privilege, parity and equity and equality may feel like oppression.