Quotes About Oppression

The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. — Fanon

I learned that love is for the most part absent and, when it appears, is usually fitful, fleeting, and finally unsatisfactory. I learned that the communities men build are based on the oppression of the many by the few, and I did not understand, I still do not understand, why the many accept this oppression

The machine of state bearing down upon its enemies.

Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age.

Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.

IT is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others.

Some people try to get you out of slavery for you to be their slave.

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.

To disarm the people... was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

A people armed and free, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression.

Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.

Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

I pray God that we shall never use our physical prowess to oppress the human race, but we will use our strength, physically, morally and otherwise to preserve humanity and civilization.

The measure of a man's estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.

When I take up my pen to write, I feel the strength of standing up and refusing to be silent. In an oppressive situation, silence is death.

Nor ought we ever to allow any growing power to acquire such a degree of strength as to be able to tear from us, without resistance, our natural, undisputed rights.

When one by force subdues men, they do not submit to him in heart. They submit because their strength is not adequate to resist.

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.

Openness without strength is useless; strength without openness is oppression.