Quotes About Oppression

What he beat you for? she ast. For being me and not you.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it. How come he look just like them, then? she say. Only bigger? And a heap more hair. How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed? (Walker 2000: 166)

If every man in this courtroom had had his penis removed, what then? Would they understand better that that condition is similar to that of all the women in this room? That, even as we sit here, the women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into?

Hard times" is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's "hard times" were made harder by them.

We were the kind of friends, instead, who understood that we were forever on the same side: the side of the poor, the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed, "the wretched of the earth.

They were assumed, like women and cats, to have no souls.

she say her head feel like its full of little white men with hammers.

They were given Christian names that went with their new summarily acquired (with the help of the lash and the threat of annihilation) religion, and then, having been branded on face or body, they were prodded onto the ships, packed, as the cliché goes, like sardines in a can.

it is the sense that something that was alive for a very long time is still alive. Not yet beaten into submission or oblivion by those who kill everything they touch with money.

Well, you know how niggers is. Can't nobody tell 'em nothing even today. Can't be ruled. Every nigger you see got a kingdom in his head.

She say to Sofia, All your children so clean, she say, would you like to work for me, be my maid? Sofia say, Hell no. She say, What you say? Sofia say, Hell no.

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

the memory of having to abase herself and denigrate her sex, for she was certain that women's minds were just as capable as men's. But to say so would be a worse heresy than Luther's!

and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk?

were the poor people so poor they could not be seen?   were the black people so many they could not be counted?

We the People - shelling the Vietcong

Mothers weep and Sons be dumb your brothers and children murder the beautiful yellow bodies of Indochina in dreams invented for your eyes by TV

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven!

He visto las mejores mentes de mi generación destruidas por la locura

But if the gospel is about God coming to establish his reign of justice and peace over all his creation, then our mission as Christians is to see God's will, his kingly reign, happen in and around us wherever that is possible. It's not just about saving souls but about seeing that the poor are fed and the oppressed are freed.

Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country?

Debt is an ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.

I fed on one of the true monsters—one of the many 'witch hunters' who interrogated and jailed the accused, seeking guilt where there was none. How humans can do such things to their fellows is beyond me. They torture, main and kill their own kind, saying it is God's will.

Patriarchy is a kind of shirk [or idolatry] … stemming from the Satanic notion of istikbar (thinking of oneself as better than another) …