Quotes About Oppression

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign wretchedness of man, used by Pascal.

We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murder.

Lorsque aucune langue connue n'est à votre disposition, il faut bien se résoudre à voler un langage - comme on volait autrefois un pain. Tous ceux - légion - qui sont hors du Pouvoir, sont contraints au vol de langage.

Voler son langage à un homme au non même du langage, tous les meurtres légaux commencent par là.

I think that we Americans, at least in the Southern col[onie]s, cannot contend with a good grace for liberty until we shall have enfranchised our slaves," Laurens told a friend right before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

Nothing alarmed the white South more than black power at the polls, which was why most terror was directed there.

With a soil and climate scarcely equaled in the world," he protested, Mexico "has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible.

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if "having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?

Wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"49

Reproaching his slave carpenters, he said, "There is not to be found so idle a set of rascals." Of a slave named Betty who worked as a spinner in the mansion, he complained that "a more lazy, deceitful and impudent hussy is not to be found in the United States.

The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics...Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him. (The Nation, progressive periodical of our day, published demeaning, racist opinions of Black Americans during Reconstruction (ie pg. 854 softcover)

Para deixar bem clara a questão, alguns exemplares foram embebidos em alcatrão e cobertos de penas, antes de serem afixados em pelourinhos.

Hamilton wanted to restrain abusive majorities and minorities.

It was all very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were rich, and turned a blind eye to the black population expiring in the canebrakes.

His whole soul was enlisted in the cause and in contending for the rights of the jury and a free press, he considered that he was establishing the surest refuge against oppression.

I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. there was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.

Every time I had seen men rise up, they had not prevailed and innocent people had died. Daddy

but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime.

She was made to stand in a garbage can for twelve hours, as the other detainees demanded that she confess her own "homosexual tendencies.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.'" Alice