Quotes About Oppression

Tell me, Elly Kleinman, why do men feel threatened by women?

I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.

She probably has a row of men's dicks nailed to her wall, like stuffed animal heads.

First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone.

That was the original idea, but once you've got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.

We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

To institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.

Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

Why should the other ones in this play get a second chance at life, but not him? Why's he have to suffer so much for being what he is? It's like he's, you know, black or Native or something. Five strikes against him from Day One. He never asked to get born.

How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment.

He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.

There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak.

There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.

Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.

Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.

That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.

to quote George Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." And to quote him again: three words: Tell. The. Truth.

Last week they shot a woman, right about here. She was a Martha. She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb. They thought she was a man in disguise. There have been such incidents. Rita and Cora knew the woman. I heard them talking about it, in the kitchen. Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe.

Yes," she said in a voice squeaky with fright. She was younger and still attractive then; she hadn't yet allowed her body to engorge. I have noted since that some kinds of men like to bully beautiful women.

Who controls the women and babies has been a keystone of every repressive regime on the planet.

It is my opinion that they sometimes take what is intended for us, which would not surprise me in the least, as it is dog eat dog around here and they are the bigger dogs.