Quotes About Oppression

Many books today suggest that the mass of women lead lives of noisy desperation.

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.

sensibilización de minorías demasiado pequeñas y, más aún, como censura permanente a través de la policía lingüística inquisitiva.

El secreto de la modernidad se esconde en su capacidad de reclutar personas de cualquier origen y cualquier confesión para que formen parte de la más grande de las campañas militares, la campaña por el alivio progresivo del estrés anónimo surgido de la opresión de lo real.

Fear binds people together in a way that cannot be achieved by other means. Those who would convert the people back to the old ways need fear, need something that will drive

Gradually, human societies started extricating themselves from the worst forms of oppression. Human sacrifice and deified rulers went out of fashion. Slavery was outlawed, and privileges were taken away from nobles. Human societies regained much of the lost ground. We are still not as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers --there are the poor and the billionaires-- but we are much better off than we were during the days of god-kings.

I grew up under Communism so we could only learn Russian, and then when Communism fell in 1989 we could learn a few more things and have the freedom to travel and the freedom of speech - and the freedom of dreaming, really.

The humble suffer when the mighty disagree.

But our land is still troubled by men who have to hate. They twist away our freedom, and they twist away our fate. Fear is their weapon, and treason is their cry. We can stop them if we try.

Douglass, who often drew comparisons between Jews and blacks, noted that the "Jew is hated in Russia because he is thrifty," while in America the "Negro meets no resistance when on a downward course. It is only when he rises in wealth, intelligence and manly character that he brings upon himself the heavy hand of persecution.

O come the time, and haste the day,When man shall man no longer crush,When Reason shall enforce her sway,Nor these fair regions raise our blush,Where still the African complains,And mourns his yet unbroken chains.

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. —Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

Time and oppression are the fathers of rebellious invention.

When you're that resigned and oppressed you're already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victims of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi. They were being killed for so long that they were already dead.

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

It's your hypocrisy that's offensive, not your brutality. You're the worst kind of fascists. The kind that think they're liberals.

Today's freedom fighters are tomorrow's dictators.

But I now had a keener appreciation of why people became Nazis in the first place; perhaps it was like he said: that they wanted to get away from dead-end, no-account places like Saarbrücken, wanted to achieve some sort of status among their fellow men, wanted their shitty, insignificant lives to mean something, even if they could find that meaning only in being mean to others—Jews, mostly, but anyone who didn't agree with them would do.

Es un silencio nacido de la vergüenza, porque incluso los inocentes son culpables. Despojado de todo derecho humano, el hombre vuelve a convertirse en un animal.

staff are terrified of them, and not without reason.

Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.

No dictatorship has ever approved of jazz.

Hanoi was cruel to its own citizens; it was cruel to our citizens; law and human rights are bourgeois concepts for which the Communists in Hanoi had little respect.

In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.