Quotes About Oppression

Repressive regimes do not endure change willingly - and Venezuela is no exception.

I think that the same kind of openness and fluidity and willingness to interrogate power that we, as feminists, expect from men in alliance on questions of class should also be the expectation that women of colour can rely upon with our white feminist allies.

It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

White people get to do that all of the time. They get to engage in bad behavior, even felonious behavior, but they rarely wind up in jail. But as a black person, losing your temper can cost you your life. Or insisting on your rights can cost you your life.

The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.

Preach or proselytize for Christianity in much of the Islamic world, and you are a candidate for martyrdom. Practice freedom of speech in Xi Jinping's China, and you can wind up in a cell.

On 30 June 2010, the FSB broke into my office again. They unplugged the Internet, opened the window and left the phone off the hook, placing it next to my laptop. The message was clear: we are still here.

Who is against human rights in Belarus today? Of course, no one should view human rights as the right to smash shop windows or stir up unrest in the streets.

Due to broken windows policing, the following interactions can lead to tickets, arrests and summonses, warrants if tickets go unpaid and, in some cases, violence: jaywalking, sleeping on a park bench, spitting, putting your feet up on the subway, and more.

I would have the Constitution torn in shreds and scattered to the four winds of heaven. Let us destroy the Constitution and build on its ruins the temple of liberty. I have brothers in slavery. I have seen chains placed on their limbs and beheld them captive.

In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn't buy property in most places.

There is a period in your life when you need your parents and a period in your life where you only think you need your parents. Something clicks, there's a little switch that goes and your parents, who had been the wind beneath your wings, through no fault of their own can start to oppress a bit, can start to stop you doing stuff.

Even if you never do anything about this, you've benefited from an unjust system. You're already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start.

In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not?

Detention cells in Hong Kong are not pleasant. In Thailand they are even worse. In Hong Kong you are at least allowed to see your lawyers.

I grew up in London under Thatcher and that really was disgusting. A feeding frenzy.

You wonder, how could socialists, true socialists work with Islamists? Because if those Islamists take over, the first thing they're going to do is kill the socialists.

When the Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh, the first thing they did was to evacuate the population. Then they took over. The point of a revolution is to bring justice to the people, so even if you don't have proof of sabotage, you manufacture it.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.

The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.

Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation's involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.