Quotes About Oppression

The State tells the epic of people's lives, putting people on the scale, weighing all the wrong things, then acting ponderous about the misinformation.

I didn't stand up to my jailers because I realized how quickly I would have been overpowered.

I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century.

Yet when women are spoken for but do not speak for themselves, such dramas of liberation become only the opening scenes of the next drama of confinement. Until women break free for themselves, the chains that make madness a female malady, like Blake's "mind forged manacles," will simply forge themselves anew.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

We knew that in the end what they were clashing over was us, what to do with the blacks, and whether or not to start treating us as human beings.

Total liberty for Black people or total destruction for America.

We overlook the two major factors: they rarely know what we are talking about when we speak of freedom in the abstract; their most pressing problem, from birth to death, now as it always has been, is hunger.

I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.

Disgust at the torments that shackle us, the chains of heavy life.

I discovered everywhere female automations created by men. There was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing.

The university doesn't free women but completes their repression.

Falei de como tinha tentado desde sempre, a fim de me impor, ser um homem na inteligência - percebi-me inventada pelos homens, colonizada por sua imaginação

Pareva che la città covasse nelle viscere una furia che non riusciva a venir fuori e perciò la erodeva, o erompeva in pustole di superficie, gonfie di veleno contro tutti, bambini, adulti, vecchi, gente di altre città, americani della Nato, turisti d'ogni nazionalità, gli stessi napoletani.

Questa è la situazione nella fabbrica dove sto io. Il sindacato non c'è mai entrato e gli operai sono nient'altro che povera gente sotto ricatto, soggetti alla legge del padrone, cioè io ti pago e quindi ti possiedo e possiedo la tua vita, la tua famiglia e tutto quello che ti circonda, e se non fai come ti dico ti rovino.

You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn't happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her

horrors of inequality, violence, always carried

Eine Gemeinschaft, die es normal findet, so viel weibliche Intelligenz mit der Sorge um Kinder und Haushalt zu ersticken, schadet sich selbst und merkt es nicht mal.

At the time I also considered myself a lowly, abject woman. I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express. For a woman who has something to say, does it really tkae a miracle — I said to myself — to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and shower herself in her own words to the world?

Por trás de toda disciplina está o pau, e quando o pau se sente impotente, recorre ao porrete, à polícia, às prisões, ao exército, aos campos de concentração; e se você não se submete, se ao contrário continua questionando tudo, vem o massacre.

She claimed that she was in the service of the workers, and yet, from her room in a house full of books and with a view of the sea, she wanted to command you, she wanted to tell you what you should do with your work, she decided for you, she had the solution ready even if you ended up in the street.

A universidade não liberta as mulheres, mas aperfeiçoa sua repressão.

I concluded by saying that the world urgently needed to be changed, that there were too many tyrants who kept peoples enslaved. But it should be changed by peaceful means.

There was something malevolent in the inequality, and now I knew it. It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money.