Quotes About Oppression

How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be important? But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle's newspaper. It was all about words. If words weren't important, they wouldn't try so hard to take them away.

Slavegirls' brats, sir, are not heralded by proud fathers in the 'Daily Gazette.' The fact that I exist is marked only by my standing here before you, blood and bone decked out in a new dress. The modern philosophers may grant me a soul, but nobody – lord, nobody – burdens me with a fate to be foreseen!

But, remember, a tyrant hates to admit he is one," Faustus said quietly. "The worse he is, the more he claims—and even believes—that

it also follows that the oppressed can't criticize the powerful. The only remedy, so far as I can see, for what threatens to be a strongly conservative upshot, is to accept an overt double standard: allow a questionable idea to be criticized if it is held by those in a position of power-Christian creationism, for example-hut not if it is held by those whom the powerful oppress-Zuni creationism, for example.

Why should the Nazis do anything to me? Just because I have a little lingerie shop in Nice and my name is Gustav Kohn? What interest can Hitler possibly have in me? Don't you think I ought to stay?

I thought of my Levantine later on when the Vichy government proclaimed laws against Jews that were modelled on those of Nürnberg.

while we professors, lawyers, physicians, agronomists, artisans, instead of busying ourselves with books, legal papers, diagnoses, weather forecasts, machine parts, were making piles of bricks that we would be ordered to unpile the day following, that verse from Exodus came into my mind, the verse in which the children of Israel are forced to bake bricks for Pharaoh of Egypt to build the treasure cities of Pithom and Raamses.

There is nothing the rabble fears more than intelligence. If they understood what is truly terrifying, they would fear ignorance.

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves;    ensure justice for those being crushed. Yes, speak up for the poor and helpless,    and see that they get justice. (Proverbs 31:8–9, NLT)

Bad people don't want to deal with the powerful. They prey on the weak.

There were millions of such families anxious only for peace and quiet in their own little nests. These were the mounting blocks by which the criminals climbed to power and kept it.

It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.

A certain inequality in regard to property still exists in a socialist society. But in a socialist society there is no unemployment, no exploitation, no oppression of nationalities.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

The very mudsills of society. We call them slaves. But I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere, it is eternal.

The coercive power of government is always a beacon to those who want to dominate others -- summoning the worst dregs of society to Washington to use that power to impose their will upon others.

Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police.

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.

We, as a society, we have PhDs in victimizing a victim.

The more humanity owes the poor man, the more society denies him.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.