Quotes About Oppression

Oppression breeds the power to oppose it

Ability is a tyranny of the majority. If most people could flap their arms and fly, the inability to do so would be a disability.

The poor are poor," Jayakumar said to me, "because someone else is trying to play God in their lives.

The powerful have a hard time seeing their own power and its effects. We do not see when our exercise of power is cutting off life and possibility for others; we do not see the ways others are resisting or undermining our own power.

ALL HAIL THE NEW ORDER!' chanted the crowd. It was a truly grotesque sight.

Early suffragists saw the vote as key to all women's personal as well as political autonomy. But a hundred years of women's suffrage has shown that gaining the right to vote or run for office will not be enough as long as we're threatened with emotional, physical, economic or sexual abuse af work, at school or in our own homes.

The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.

I think everyone would recognize that we were in the middle of a fascist uprising.

Great scientists and mathematicians were sent to the guillotine, too, on the grounds that the republic "does not need scientists."52

Life under the Taliban is, to a first approximation, what millions of Muslims around the world want to impose on the rest of us. They long to establish a society in which—when times are good—women will remain vanquished and invisible, and anyone given to spiritual, intellectual, or sexual freedom will be slaughtered before crowds of sullen, uneducated men.

Bleed, bleed, poor country!Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure;For goodness dares not check thee!His title is affear'd.Shakesp.Macbeth.

The expectation of ignorance is indefinite, and that of knowledge is often tyrannical.

to never again be led like sheep to the slaughter.

Lo común es que la literatura provenga del lado de las víctimas, pues el escritor, agazapado, se siente más cómodo donde caen las bombas que al lado de los cañones

El poder suele llamar terrorista a quien lo asusta a él, que no siempre coincide con quien asusta a la población. Hay casos en que sí coincide, sin duda, pero hay otros en que lo más terrorífico para un pueblo es su propio gobernante

complaining often means drawing attention to yourself at the very time you draw attention to structures.

If a world can be what we learn not to notice, noticing becomes a form of political labor.

A complaint can be a point you reach when you can't take it, when you are "just done with this," the violence

White supremacy can be enacted in the response to a complaint about white supremacy; you can be dispossessed from a complaint about dispossession.

This kind of caring for oneself is not about caring for one's own happiness. It is about finding ways to exist in a world that makes it difficult to exist. This is why, this is how: those who do not have to struggle for their own survival can very easily and rather quickly dismiss those who attend to their own survival as being self-indulgent. They do not need to attend to themselves; the world does it for them.

So much feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended; that sexism and racism are fundamental to the injustices of late capitalism; that they matter.

When violence gets in, a complaint comes out.

Whiteness can be reproduced in the spaces where it is supposedly being questioned. You even have to do the work of questioning the terms of their terms ("if you want to decolonize, we'll do it on our terms"). If you don't use their terms, or if you question their terms, what happens then? You might be dropped; you might be stopped. But the questions you raise are turned into questions about you.

If a body can express a complaint, a body can be a complaint testimony.