Quotes About Oppression

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive

A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.

The ultimate tyranny in a society is not control by martial law. It is control by the psychological manipulation of consciousness, through which reality is defined so that those who exist within it do not even realize that they are in prison. They do not even realize that there is something outside of where they exist.

New laws, new restrictions, new regulations, were put in place regularly. The purpose was always to crush, to destroy, not to aid. They were being bled white all in the guise of the greater good.

We are certainly damaged people. The question is, finally, do we use that damage, that first-hand knowledge of oppression, to recognize each other, to do what work we can together? Or do we use it to destroy?

A black feminist perspective has no use for ranking oppressions, but instead demonstrates the simultaneity of oppressions as they affect Third World women's lives".

Antifeminists are incapable of making a distinction between being critically opposed to sexual oppression and simply hating men. Women's desire for fairness and safety in our lives does not necessitate hating men. Trying to educate and inform men about how their feet are planted on our necks doesn't translate into hatred either.

Free must be like a whippoorwill that could fly here and there and settle where it pleased... free could mean to get paid for your work like white folks... free was like the free black boy who... gave her water... if you were free, you wouldn't be whipped." (58)

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.

executions were meant as an exercise in frightfulness according to the theory developed by the Emperor Caligula: "Oderint dum metuant" (Let them hate us as long as they fear us).

servile degree." The object of the noble's function, in theory, was not fighting for fighting's sake, but defense of the two other estates and the maintenance of justice and order. He was supposed to protect the people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue—that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in Christianity, if not by its founder.

The worst slavery is that which we voluntarily impose upon ourselves; and no chains are so cumbrous and galling as those which we are pleased to wear by way of grace and ornament.

Something about all that power seemed to make the assholes who wielded it believe they were invulnerable.

Mystery and terror are the bulwarks of tyranny.

you can only know a country when you have seen its prisons.

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .

No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.

According to Josephus, Gessius Florus never omitted "any sort of violence, nor any unjust sort of punishment; . . . it was this Florus who necessitated us [the Jews] to take up arms against the Romans, while we thought it better to be destroyed at once, than by little and little" (Antiquities 20:254–57).

When Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) found out who had published a nasty pamphlet about her, she had the authors' right hands cut off. Now there's an idea! (Or not.) For the moment, let's say that a Mean Girl is treating you

por un cristiano que los indios matasen, habían los cristianos de matar cien indios.

En las cuales (si se permitiesen) han de tornarse a hacer, pues de sí mismas (hechas contra aquellas indianas gentes, pacíficas, humildes y mansas que a nadie ofenden) son inicuas, tiránicas, y por toda ley natural, divina y humana condenadas, detestadas

Y porque toda la gente que huir podía se encerraba en los montes y subía a las sierras huyendo de hombres tan inhumanos, tan sin piedad y tan feroces bestias, extirpadores y capitales enemigos del linaje humano, ense

secábaseles la leche de las tetas a las mujeres paridas, e así murieron en breve todas las criaturas. Y por estar los maridos apartados, que nunca vían a las mujeres, cesó entre ellos la generación; murieron ellos en las minas, de trabajos y hambre, y ellas en las estancias o granjas, de lo mesmo, e así se acabaron tantas e tales multitúdines de gentes de aquella isla; e así se pudiera haber acabado todas las del mundo.