Quotes About Oppression

Galileo was jailed for asserting that the earth was round.5

Then there are people with modest but real power—and who take sick satisfaction from frustrating and pushing others around.

He defines co—dependency as: "an emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual's prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules—rules which prevent the open expression of feeling, as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems."3

Managers know that to be weak in a world that extols strength and power is to invite abuse.

But too often men react to women in positions of power with misogyny, often in sexualized terms. I have heard men in such situations talk about how "I'd like to fuck that bitch and teach her a lesson," for example. That kind of reaction demonstrates that no matter what the class position of a man and woman, men can use the weapon of sexualized violence to attempt to assert their dominance.

Feminism remains a crucial element of any program for social justice today, which is why patriarchal forces attempt to eliminate or marginalize feminist ideas.

every decent man confronted by a totalitarian regime ought to have the pluck to commit high treason.

In Russia we have a proverb--it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

If the Nazis discovered they could push you, they would push you to your death. You had to be too much trouble to make it easy, but not so much they grew tired of you.

she did not want to have to explain to him that while the world was fighting a so-called "master race" intent on ruthlessly exterminating people that they judged inferior or impure, America itself was still a stronghold of racism and discrimination.

Wherever there are children, there will always be injustice.

Thelonious had been born into extreme poverty. His mother and grandmother spent their lives scrubbing floors for a living, and his father, Thelonious, Sr., cobbled together work as an unskilled day laborer in the railroad town of Rocky Mount. His grandfathers had lived a life of debt peonage, share-cropping for ex-slave masters and surviving pretty much from meal to meal.

People do crazy things when they're keeping girls locked up in their shed.

I was going. I couldn't stay here. Every breath of its stale air, every square inch of the place mocked me, grabbed at my ankles. It needed blood to survive and it wasn't going to get mine.

In addition, local authorities were ordered to seize each Christian man, to pluck out his beard and to tattoo a black mark on his shoulder. When few Christians defected in response to these measures, the Kh?n then ordered that all Christian men be castrated and have one eye put out—which caused many deaths in this era before antibiotics, but did lead to many conversions.37

DURING THE SUMMER OF THE year 64, the emperor Nero sometimes lit up his garden at night by setting fire to a few fully conscious Christians who had been covered with wax and then impaled high on poles forced up their rectums. Nero also had Christians killed by wild animals in the arena, and he even crucified a few.

Darkie! Sambo! You must think we're dumb. Are we dumb? From the slaveships to world wars, to the underground and the hospitals, it's always been about the labour, never about the living. Cheap muscles and blood to build you an empire.

The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn't matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is 'Kill all liars!

If one looks back to the French Revolution, one sees just how easy it is for the doctrine of "human rights" to become an instrument of the most appalling tyranny. It suffices to do as the Jacobins did—to abolish the judiciary, and replace it by "people's courts." Then anything can be done to anyone, in the name of the Rights of Man.

The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons.

The pursuit of abstract social justice goes hand in hand with the view that power struggles and relations of domination express the truth of our social condition, and that the consensual customs, inherited institutions and systems of law that have brought peace to real communities are merely the disguises worn by power. The goal is to seize that power, and to use it to liberate the oppressed, distributing all the assets of society according to the just requirements of the plan.

The common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

When the Communist Party took over Eastern Europe, its first work was to destroy the civil associations that it did not control.

If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.