Quotes About Oppression

These people are very unskilled in arms... with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.

The Iranian regime doesn't express the wishes and values of the Iranian people.

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.

The Taliban is the Muslim version of the Salem witch trials.

Redheads were particularly persecuted during the European witch trials of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The colour was associated with the devil, and the pale skin which most redheads have was thought unnatural and deathly.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

My heart's desire was freedom... 400 years ago they'd have burned me as a witch or dunked me like a big biscuit.

The whole concept of witches was that women were speaking up for themselves and fighting for their rights. The whole concept of witchcraft came into play to hold down women and women's empowerment.

I was forced away from the plantation because I wouldn't go back and withdraw, you know, my literacy test after I had tried to take it. I wouldn't go back.

If I had it in my power to introduce a ban on women driving cars and to withdraw all their licences, I would do it without thinking twice.

If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America... that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers and poison the fair fruits of freedom.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, in general, by putting this idea out there that the one percent is leeching off the 99 percent, is making a new discussion, making people figure out how to withhold their labor and come and put their issues on the table with the ruling class all over the country and all over the world.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.

From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.

Of course, there can be serious injustices within free societies.

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Unfortunately, history suggests that dictatorial regimes can withstand years, even decades, of economic sanctions.

Women with education, skills, and independent sources of income are more able to withstand the pressures of the patriarchal family and more able to express their opinions and to move freely within their communities.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.