Quotes About Oppression

Everyone will be happier if fewer women are tied to abusive men, drop out of school, and live impoverished lives because of a random pregnancy.

A lot of people don't understand what feminism is. They think it is about advance and success for women, but it's not that at all. It is about power for the female left. And they have this, I think, ridiculous idea that American women are oppressed by the patriarchy and we need laws and government to solve our problems for us.

I was a product of the society that said women are for decoration, and I do think girls should be able to do whatever they want.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Freedom is never easily won, but once established, freedom lasts, spreads and chokes out tyranny.

Felons are typically stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They're relegated to a permanent undercaste.

Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

You know, being an 'other' in this world, you're walking around in a horror movie at all times, you're always on edge and wondering when the monster is going to jump out and get you. I feel like that's the experience of African-Americans and queer people in America.

Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.

First it was the whites, and then their Negro message bearers. And the word was always the same: 'Tell your sons to take their names off the books. Don't show up at the courthouse voting day.'

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

We must use words to uplift and include. We can use our words to fight back against oppression and hate. But we must also channel our words into action.

If there is no word that means you don't have the concept. In North Korea they eliminate the words: depression, stress, dictatorship, human rights. You cannot think of those. That's why all the brainwashing was possible.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.

Sometimes I feel as if four thousand years of silencing women, of the fear of women who were burned in oil or eviscerated in front of their daughters, is imprinted deep within me and has altered my DNA.

I used to be very interested in the history of women's rights in this country and in other countries. I tried to learn as much as I could about it, and more than anything, I would be called gay. It was phenomenal. But if a boy has something to say, he is appreciated; he's even popular. If a girl says something, it's instantly a threat.