Quotes About Oppression

He knew that he was hated, abhorred by the mass of the people, and this knowledge made him react against the external world, and at the same time increased the satisfaction and pleasure he found in the servility, solicitude, and adulation of his dependents, who had consolidated his interests and prosperity and extended to the utmost a sovereignty quite unsupported by legality and constitution.

Ladies and gentlemen, is there no way Of getting all honourable dogs free, once and for all, from their shameful slavery to mankind

And there was a lot of exclaiming about some Massa Patrick Henry having cried out, 'Give me liberty or give me death!' Kunta liked that, but he couldn't understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him.

Mingo went toward his cabin, but turning at the door, he looked back at George. "Hear me, boy! You thinks you's sump'n special wid massa, but nothin' don't make no difference to mad, scared white folks! Don't you be no fool an' slip off nowhere till this blow over, you hear me? I mean don't!

Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.

Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?

There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before.

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.

In such a way is freedom of thought lost," said Angus Lordie, who had been listening very attentively to Domenica. "By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit.

a prison of put-downs and belittlements.

Nobody challenged men openly, of course, but when women spoke now amongst themselves" (pg.33)

Attacks on political correctness, in her view, were often made by those who had never suffered insult or known what it was like to be at the bottom of the heap.

And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote. It now seems completely clear to me, looking back, that when a government talks about "fighting for Freedom" almost every Freedom you can imagine disappears for ordinary people and expands limitlessly for a handful of people in power.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless,'" Arundhati Roy has said. "There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look Africa; and yet here I still was.

Who you pretends you is, you comes to be. The nigger that bows to the Master on the street, who acts the fool, who forgets who he am, that man a slave. He shuts his bible, he deserves to be a slave

Most Mistress no more free do what they want than I is or Pork is or ary colored.

These questions must determine the accused's fate. This is the sense and essence of red terror. . . . It doesn't judge the enemy, it strikes him. It shows no mercy, but incinerates anyone who takes up arms on the other side of the barricades and who is of no use to us. . . . But it isn't a guillotine cutting off heads at a tribunal's instance. . . . We, like the Israelites, have to build the Kingdom of the Future

Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Why don't we like them?" Katalin asked. "Because they don't treat us right." After Zoltán said it, he marveled at the realization that in trying to clarify years of abuses and lists of grievances, that in trying to make oppression understandable for a child, he had reduced the horror of Soviet domination to one simple, honest statement of fact: The Russians didn't treat the Hungarians right.

The American system for building wealth has always taken wealth away from black Americans and given it to white American - beginning when enslaved blacks were stripped of their humanity and counted as the property that became the white wealth that still benefits white Americans and corporations today.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.