Quotes About Oppression

Christians well know that the much-decorated statue of the Church, as it now stands, is not of pure chiseled marble, but of clay, cemented together by blood and tears and hardened in the fires of hatred and persecution.

When Colin Kaepernick first took a knee, he took it, and he identified police brutality, aggressive policing techniques, he broadened it to things like oppression to inequality.

People who believe in freedom of expression have spent several centuries fighting against censorship, in whatever form. We have to be certain the 'Net' doesn't become the site for technological book burning.

The indigenous peoples never had, and still do not have, the place that they should have occupied in the progress and benefits of science and technology, although they represented an important basis for this development.

As I've said many times, the single most oppressed class in America right now is the teenager.

I grew up in a country that was in a civil conflict for most of my childhood and adolescence. I saw violence and lived as a teenager through the time of a brutal dictator called Idi Amin. I fled and became a refugee.

As I was researching, I was struck by how similar the Boxers were to Joan of Arc. Joan was basically a French Boxer. She was a poor teenager who wanted to do something about the foreign aggressors invading her homeland.

I grew up in Cuba under a strong, military, oppressive dictatorship. So as a teenager, I found myself involved in a revolution. I remember during that time, a young, charismatic leader rose up, talking about hope and change. His name was Fidel Castro.

From the moment we were first dumped in Jamestown and had our teeth checked before getting sold off and later considered three-fifths of a human being, an abundance of 'likability' hasn't been something blacks have had to stockpile. Instead, it's been a centuries-long battle for respectability.

As slavery died for the greater good of America, and the movement for equality sputtered to life, the white woman was on the cover of every American magazine. She was the dazzling jewel on every movie screen, the glory of every commercial and television show.

In a state of poverty, illiteracy, people just remain exposed to all kinds of manipulation. That's what we have lived. It's easier to tell a poor person, 'You know what, you are poor, you're hungry because the other one has taken away your rights.'

They don't have to tell me what life is like in a ghetto.

It's just not funny to disrespect other people's beliefs, backgrounds, cultures, or identities when those are deeply rooted in longstanding oppression. Jokes that punch down on marginalized people require no creativity because they've existed since the beginning of time. It's like telling a knock-knock joke and believing you're Richard Pryor.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.

With shame be it spoken: by her fall, the Church's liberties have been sacrificed for the sake of temporal advantages. The road to her ruin lay through the sinuous paths of riches: she has been prostituted in the streets to princes; she has conceived iniquity and will bring forth oppression to the undeserving.

There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

In a jungle full of totalitarian monsters liberal democracy needs teeth.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

What could he say? After the phone calls and the beating. After the desecration of his locker. The silent treatment. Pushed downstairs. What they did to Goober, to Brother Eugene. What guys like Archie and Janza did to the school. What they would do to the world when they left Trinity.

Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.

Injustice was not built of stone and mortar, or of metal. It was built of greed, inhumanity, and man's thirst for power.