Quotes About Oppression

It seems it's always the innocent who pay the highest price for injustice. It's seemed that way all my life.

My crime is being Indian. What's yours?

In Michelangelo was realized the grandeur of Italy struggling vainly against crushing oppression. He expressed that which was highest in it, reflecting the loftiest side of its idealism mingled with deep pessimism in his survey over life; for, wrapped in austerity, he saw mankind in heroic terms of sadness.

But the rope is still more horrible when it forms the noose around the necks of weak and ignorant people.

Bu tarihte ak?ls?zl?k ve kan, zorbal?k ve yalan görüyorum, sürekli çiÄŸnedikleri yeminlerini duyuyor, Tanr?'ya dua ederken a??zlar?ndan ç?kan her insaf ve merhamet yakar???nda, üzerlerine bast?klar? topra?? nas?l aÅŸa??lad?klar?n? dinliyorum.

Adiós a ti del ruso sucia patria nación de encomenderos y de esclavos. Adiós a esas guerreras azuladas. Adiós al pueblo por ellas maniatado. Quizá yo, tras el Cáucaso erguido, esconderme podré de los tiranos, de su ojo que todo lo registra, de su oído que nada escucha en vano.

But very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.

We have not always been forced to pass, to go underground, in order to work and live. We have a right to live openly and proudly...when our lives are suppressed, everyone is denied an understanding of the rich diversity of sex and gender expression and experience that exist in human society.

Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.

People who lack economic and social power often expand their physical impact on the world. -In Pursuit of Silence

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

Women who have power are always feared.

The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness.

I'm not that kind of Indian," Shanti said, her practiced smile never leaving her face, though it faltered just a bit, and in that slight wobble was something hard and angry, something that looked like centuries of colonial oppression boiling up into an I'm-going-to-kick-your-ass-in-this-pageant-and-then-take-over-all-your-beauty-out-sourcing-needs hatred.

Gemma, you see how it is. They've planned our entire lives, from what we shall wear to whom we shall marry and where we shall live. It's one lump of sugar in your tea whether you like it or not and you'd best smile even if you're dying deep inside. We're like pretty horses, and just as on horses, they mean to put blinders on us so we can't look left or right but only straight ahead where they would lead. Please, please, please, Gemma, let's not die inside before we have to.

I am beginning to understand why those ancient women had to hide in caves. Why our parents and teachers and suitors want us to behave properly and predictably. It's not that they want to protect us; it's that they fear us.

You know who's getting hurt? Workers. Poor people. Immigrants. Every day. It's a rigged game, Evie. The people at the top say they believe in the people at the bottom until those people try to climb up. And then the people at the top step on the hands of the climbing people they claim to believe in and cast them down the ladder.

But it would have made them suspect. Women who have power are always feared

They would have been mystics and healers, women who worked with herbs and delivered babies. But it would have made them suspect. Women who have power are always feared," she says sadly.

My aunt says you should only pray to Jesus. Blind Bill grunted and spat. You think the white folks' god is gonna help you? You think he's on our side? I don't think anybody's god is on our side.

So we learned the dance that cripples the human spirit, step by step by step, we who were white and we who were colored, day by day, hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our life without thinking.

Perhaps rage was an inextricable part of lesbian-feminism, because once these women analyzed the female's position in society they realized they had much to be furious about.

hey'd say that heterosexual women become feminists when they finally understand that society doesn't allow them to be complete and free human beings— but lesbians had always understood that. Feminists are finally realizing that sex roles dehumanize women— but lesbian had always understood that; they'd always refused to a cape the limitations and oppressions opposed by the womanly role.

Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women's rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.