Quotes About Oppression

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe...It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.

So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.

In this other life, she would not be required to take all the shit that no one else would accept and pretend to be grateful.

Why was it I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619? Was it the tug of all the lost mothers and orphaned children? Or was it that each generation felt anew the yoke of a damaged life and the distress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien?

In the tradition of warriorship, to celebrate moment to moment is called discipline. Discipline is not a sense of oppression or being punished; it is freedom from our own self-perpetuating laziness.

To someone seeking power, the poorest man is the most useful.

Memmius:) But perhaps you are not yet weary of the tyranny of these men; perhaps these times please you less than those when kingdoms, provinces, laws, rights, the administration of justice, war and peace, and indeed every thing civil and religious, was in the hands of an oligarchy; while you, that is, the people of Rome, though unconquered by foreign enemies, and rulers of all nations around, were content with being allowed to live; for which of you had spirit to throw off your slavery?

Denn nur wenige Menschen wollen die Freiheit, ein großer Teil aber gerechte Herren.

quae apud alios iracundia dicitur, ea in imperio superbia atque crudelitas appellatur.

in Afghanistan, the women refer to their illiteracy as blindness. When I asked them what they meant by that, one woman explained: 'I couldn't read, so I couldn't see what was going on.' In fewer than a dozen words, she described a system that men in power have relied on for centuries-keep women uneducated so they won't know what's going on.

To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prision at the pleasure of the Government.

There's probably a higher level of Christians being persecuted during the last ten, twenty years than ... throughout human history.

Society always tries to enslave, imprison, and execute its greatest men, those who dare to stand apart and rise above.' He scratched his chin. 'That's why I'm keeping a low profile--so the bastards don't get me.

Society always tries to enslave, imprison, and execute its greatest men, those who dare to stand apart and rise above.

he asks me, as if Ruth's become invisible. That's fucked up but that's what happens to women. We grow up into ghosts. No one wants to screw Ruth anymore so she's invisible.

Just like the dry land to name the cruel things in the water after women.

All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable Oppression, civil or religious, to leave the Society they belong to and enter into another. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent, and they have a Right to demand and insist upon the performance of such Conditions and previous Limitations as form an equitable original Compact.

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

The true object of loyalty is a good legal constitution, which, as it condemns every instance of oppression and lawless power, derives a certain remedy to the sufferer by allowing him to remonstrate his grievances, and pointing out methods of relief when the gentle arts of persuasion have lost their efficacy.

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

None but the dead have free speech.

Indeed, it is sobering to think that the Great American Novel to come will have so little to do with the famous "American Dream" but will have to be far nearer a contemporary Les Misérables.