Quotes About Oppression

Whether democracy or aristocracy is the better form of government constitutes a very difficult question. But, clearly, democracy inconveniences one person while aristocracy oppresses another. That is a truth which establishes itself and precludes any discussion: you are rich and I am poor.

Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?

When the question is reduced to the simple expression of the struggle between poverty and wealth, the tendency of each side of the dispute becomes perfectly evident without further controversy.

Whoever seeks anything from freedom but freedom itself is doomed to slavery.

it is certain that democracy annoys one part of the community, and that aristocracy oppresses another part.

the Negro and the Indian. These two unhappy races have nothing in common; neither birth, nor features, nor language, nor habits. Their only resemblance lies in their misfortunes. Both of them occupy an inferior rank in the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and if their wrongs are not the same, they originate, at any rate, with the same authors.

Quand on compare ces vaines apparences de la liberté avec l'impuissance réelle qui y était jointe, on y découvre déjà en petit comment le gouvernement le plus absolu peut se combiner avec quelques-unes des formes de la plus extrême démocraties, de telle sorte qu'à l'oppression vienne encore s'ajouter le ridicule de n'avoir pas l'air de la voir

the European is to the other races of mankind, what man is to the lower animals;—he makes them subservient to his use; and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them.

No man can justly impose anything upon those who owe him nothing. . . . Whosoever therefore . . . grounds his pretensions of right upon usurpation and tyranny, declares himself to be, like Nimrod, a usurper and a tyrant, that is an enemy to God and man, and to have no right at all.

Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with propriety, women who had enemies, women who took lovers, women who knew about the mysteries of childbirth, all were suspect (…)

Women here in Massachusetts had been drowned and beaten and hanged, especially if they were found to have access to books other than the Bible, for the Puritans had been convinced that they alone had the ear of God.

he thought of Jesus as a great teacher, a rebel who refused to see the poor and disenfranchised mistreated.

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them.

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them. They burned books about medicine and magic, books in Hebrew and in Spanish and Portuguese.

the sky outside was so gloomy it pushed down on anyone who dared to walk beneath it.

When you chain something up, you turn him into something he shouldn't be.

Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of an infant's life. Afterward they are repressed and are then, because of their very nature, inaccessible to argument. Nothing changes in the character of submission or dependency, when it is only their object that is changed.

individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves

We admire people who oppose the regime in totalitarian country and think they have courage or a strong moral sense or have remained true to their principles and the like. We may also smile at their naïveté, thinking, Don't they realise that their words are of no use at all against this oppressive power? That they will hath to pay dearly for their protest?

People brought up cruelly (and unfortunately that is still the majority) willingly submit to dictators and cheer them on when they supply them with an enemy they can execrate.

Those who persecute others are warding of knowledge of their own fate as victims.

I understood what a mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and how I had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time, and she would not know.

I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.