Quotes About Oppression

In this city, apparently, the authorities crushed revolutions before they started, by turning them into homework.

The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.

The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own.

The tragic history of Spanish America was ready to be written . . . in blood.

14 A discerning mind seeks knowledge, but the mouth of fools feeds on foolishness. 15 All the days of the oppressed are miserable, but a cheerful heart has a continual feast.

I always believed that women have rights and that there are some women that are intelligent enough to claim those rights. There are some others that are stupid enough not to. It is as cut-and dried as that. It doesn't matter if you are a woman or not; in this life, to earn your place you have to fight for it.

By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain's biggest source of revenue, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India's own expense. Indians literally paid for their own oppression.

We literally paid for our own oppression.

As I was typing this last sentence, somewhat hastily, my computer's spellcheck offered 'Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India!

With the absorption of each native state, the (East India) company official John Sullivan observed in 1840s: The little court disappears--the capital decays--trade languishes--the capital decays--the people are impoverished--the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.

The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company [the British East India Company] utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which has now [1930] gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years.

simple logic of colonialism, under which the rules of humanity applied only to the rulers, for the rulers were people and the people were objects. Objects to be controlled, disciplined, kept in their place and taught lessons like so many animals:

Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant.

As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were 'compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions'. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.

subjugation of India under British rule.

By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain's biggest source of revenue, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India's own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.

it is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but to their former owners, for their 'loss of property'!)

British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

If India's GDP went down because it 'missed the bus' of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.

Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India!

So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

The little court disappears—trade languishes—the capital decays—the people are impoverished—the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened