Quotes About Oppression

Do you know what the Negro is? Animal right out of the jungle. Passion. Welfare. Easy life. That's the Negro.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.

When you're black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people. It's a dirty, dark secret; I'm glad it's coming out.

The aim of my life is the overthrow of monarchy.

Suicide was a crime. It was "alienating oneself from the people," according to what Chairman Mao said. So

Another student said his teacher had deliberately ruined his students' eyesight by making them read a lot, so they could not join the Liberation Army. Still

That doesn't mean that you should make up a story about something you never did!" Dad's voice grew still louder. "So what if I never listened to foreign radio broadcasts? They'll stop beating me if I confess to it, won't they? 'Leniency to those who confess, and severity to those who resist.' Look at my face, Lao Jiang. I can't stand it anymore… .

We had a bad class status. That was why An Yi was not allowed to wear mourning bands or even cry aloud for her grandmother. That was why my house was searched, and strangers could come in and do whatever they wanted. It was just a simple fact. Why should I ask why? There was absolutely nothing I could do to change it.

The Red Guards at her school held struggle meetings to criticize her almost every day. During those struggle meetings they beat her and whipped her with their belts.

The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right," as Martin Luther King Jr. once said. The nation is often wrong. But so long as protest is possible, it can always be righted.

W. E. B. Du Bois was walking from his rooms on campus to deliver to the offices of a city newspaper a restrained essay about the lynching of Sam Hose, a black farmer, when he saw, displayed in a store window, Hose's knuckles. Hose had been dismembered, and barbecued, his body parts sold as souvenirs.

In Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson asked, dryly, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

DURING THE WAR, nearly one in five slaves in the United States left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty.

Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.

How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?"2

Masculine systems."77 That women were left out of the nation's founding documents, and out of its founders' idea of civil society, considered, like slaves, to be confined to a state of nature, would trouble the political order for centuries.

The only way to justify this contradiction, the only way to explain how one kind of people are born free while another kind of people are not, would be to sow a new seed, an ideology of race. It would take a long time to grow, and longer to wither.

Those who are by nature possessions are those who have a lesser capacity for reason; these people "are by nature slaves," Aristotle wrote, "and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master."40

In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910.

mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

When I reached this policeman in the street, he hit me over the head with his club...I wanted to get protection, but instead the cops hit me...I was afraid to run, because I knew if I did they would hit me again. Harry Reed's affidavit is dated August 22, 1900. And little has changed in a century.

This is just as true in the United States as it has been in Egypt, Tunisia, and dozens of other locales around the world, and despite mainstream media's heavy focus over the past few years on the alleged censorship of right-wing populists, it is and has always been marginalized communities most affected by these new forms of censorship.

Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.

Since people are animals—especially ones who've been encouraged their entire lives to view you as a natural predator who's constantly seeking to kill, maim, defame, and oppress them—they tend to smell blood with every escalating gesture of compassion. It emboldens them to bite the hand that meekly holds out the olive branch.