Quotes About Oppression

I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.

Having grown up in a racist culture where 2 and 2 are not 5, I have found life to be incredibly theatrical and theater to be profoundly lifeless.

. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.

We know the legislation that passed the House. It was the worst piece of legislation frankly against working class people that I can remember in my political life in the Congress.

Choosing our own aims and seeking to bring them to fruition creates a sense of vitality and motivation in life. The only things that derail our efforts are fear and oppression.

Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.

The history of empires is the history of human misery.

Men were so violent, she complained. Why were men so violent? You had to be careful as a woman. You could get somebody's nose broken if you griped that they had pinched you or even looked at you funny. And of course that wasn't what you wanted; you just wanted to be left alone. Also, you knew that the mean son of a bitch that broke the poor jerk's nose was just getting his rocks off--didn't care about you personally.

Religion, too, he warned, especially when "kindled into enthusiasm," is a "force like that of other passions" and "may become a motive to oppression.

Jack Warner "didn't want any niggers on his lot." At another studio where he was being considered for a publicity position, he learned that the all-Negro cast of Cabin in the Sky was excluded from the whites-only commissary.

Himes's message was the cruelty, the destructiveness, the absurdity of black oppression. These messages may be found in all his books, but his best writings transcend message to express a comic exuberance, a vitality, a richness of black life that all the injustices and dreadful miseries he records cannot overcome.

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.

Without all that young stuff, Stamford, you will die a slave. And it will not be a pretty die.

All republics that acquire supremacy over other nations, rule them selfishly and oppressively. There is no exception to this in either ancient or modern times. Carthage, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Pisa, Holland, and Republican France, all tyrannized over every province and subject state where they gained authority.

People afterward told him that it had taken courage to say what he thought. Not at all, he responded; it takes courage in the Soviet Union or in South Africa to say what one thinks, not in the United States.

1. We fear people because they can expose and humiliate us. 2. We fear people because they can reject, ridicule, or despise us. 3. We fear people because they can attack, oppress, or threaten us. These three reasons have one thing in common: they see people as "bigger" (that is, more powerful and significant) than God, and, out of the fear that creates in us, we give other people the power and right to tell us what to feel, think, and do.

no one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slaveholders cheering them on

As a lawyer practices the law; similarly, the victimizer creates the victim, and the tyrant constitutes the tyranny; naturally, every object and subject has its executor. The solution is simple as only a diamond cuts the diamond.

Patently, I exchange not justice, fairness, and voice for oppressed people, wherever they live. No matter, whatever I have to sacrifice for that; otherwise, it shows and proves the self-beneficial attitude, in other words, the supporter of the gang of political dastards and scoundrels.

The black rule, in the White House hands. Indeed, it shows the humiliation of the United Nations and human rights. The world observes that nonsense silently.

The male majority in the world, especially in Asia, enforce the self-ego-verdict of only its wishes for entire life upon female journey-mate, during the Wedding Night instead of love and respect; consequently, the women become the victim of men. This unjust custom rejects the rights of a woman at both laws, judicial and religious.

The wolves in the uniform with the license to do that.

The worst crime in this world is victimization, whether it is a person, system, or constitution of society.

We are still slaves, facing colonialists and their pawns, direct or indirect, in the package of so-called democracies.