Quotes About Oppression

Rules, rules, she said softly. All you ever talk about is rules. That's how you and your kind have destroyed everything—science, religion, socialism—with your rules and your orthodoxies. That's the difference between us: you worry about rules and I worry about being human.

that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection?

La tragedia de los hombres, decía Shaltiel, no estriba en que los perseguidos y los oprimidos aspiren a liberarse y a hacerse respetar. No. La maldad está en que los oprimidos, en lo más profundo de sus corazones, realmente sueñan en convertirse en opresores de sus opresores. Los perseguidos anhelan ser perseguidores. Los siervos sueñan con ser amos.

The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Cuándo se nos concederá el privilegio de respirar aire fresco?

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

The homosexuals wrote as if they were women. The timid ones wrote about orgies. The frigid ones about frenzied fulfill-ments. The most poetic ones indulged in pure bestiality and the purest ones in perversions. We were haunted by the marvelous tales we could not tell. We sat around, imagined this old man, talked of how much we hated him, because he would not allow us to make a fusion of sexuality and feeling, sensuality and emotion.

I'm sick of this white poverty, the vulgarity of my daily life.

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.

De armoede van de mens is een slaaf; om te eten aanvaardt ze werk waarin ze geen vreugde heeft; alle werk dat niet vreugdevol is, is verwerpelijk, dacht ik, en ik betaalde de rust van velen. Ik zei: 'Werk maar niet; je vindt het vervelend.' Ik droomde voor ieder van hen van de vrijheid waarzonder niets nieuws kan ontbloeien, geen enkel kwaad, geen enkele kunst.

Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.

The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its use because of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because he is not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke.

Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.

Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

The dark was hissing and hot and hard with a jagged bone, a cold brutal bone, and hips packed tight. The dark wasn't just at night. The dark was any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there, right up against you, pressing. You can't see anything and you don't know any names, not who they are or the names for what they do...

Most women cannot afford, either materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection will not appease the angry little gods around them.

Much of society is set up specifically to assist people in their process of ignoring the horrors of the world.

Men on Women For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when." "Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together" which is profound and moving.

Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the the culture defines it.

Only the toughest among women will make the necessary next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end. Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you rights, honor and knowledge, because you earn them.