Quotes About Oppression

In a way the better the master;the worse the condition of slave,because it makes him forget what he is.

There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.

He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.

Well sir, if slavery is freedom then I'm glad I don't have to make a meal of it. Whips and chains are not much to my taste.

I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend.

He's a bloody idiot who knows nothing about anything, but he was born with a cock, so he gets to decide for all of us.

A dark-skinned young woman sat on the roof of the aftcastle, one leg swinging as she watched the new slaves shuffle across.

The King needs money, so he squeezes the nobles. The nobles squeeze their tenants, the tenants squeeze the peasants. Some of them, the old, the weak, the extra sons and daughters, they get squeezed right out the bottom. Too many mouths to feed. The lucky ones make thieves or whores, the rest end up begging.

There used to be," she muttered, "but they whip it out of you. They whip you until they're sure there's nothing left." Yulwei stood there, with that pitying look on his face. Strange, how it didn't make her angry any more.

As I've said many times, the single most oppressed class in America right now is the teenager.

Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn't say is that voice belongs to HER. There's only one song to sing these days--Carol's song--and if you aren't in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up.

He thought the government was trying to enslave humanity by controlling grammar.

It was entirely possible, she saw now, for them to have their cake and rape and murder it, too.

Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain't going to fix them." On his 1942 enlistment in what a critic called "a white man's army,

The humble and meek are thirsting for blood.

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

Historical events may stay in the collective records of memory, or they may be allowed to deteriorate, slowly or rapidly, through the overt choices of the powerful. The latter usually seek to suppress or weaken collective memories of societal oppression, and to construct positive and often fictional memories of that history.

The projects looked like a place where dreams went to commit suicide and hope got screwed in the ass.

I would simply crush his windpipe so he could say no more offensive things to women.

books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.

There are evils . . . that men inflict upon one another, such as tyrannical domination of some of them over others. —THE GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED, III, 2

When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.

When civilisation declined, it was the women who always suffered most.

It's like a letter-writing society. They approach it like poetry. Not all of it is rebellious, some of it is quite beautiful. Just art, from kids who live in a world where they'll likely never see art. At least not officially.