Quotes About Oppression

In fact, it works the other way: A government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class and those who hope to join it.

I'd been in jail, and I'd been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to - they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.

There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.

The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.

I am the people, I'm not the pig. You got to make a distinction. And the people are going to have to attack the pigs. The people are going to have to stand up against the pigs. That's what the Panthers is doing, that's what the Panthers are doing all over the world.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.

If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.

I was born in a ghetto on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I was born as Emmett Till was dying and the civil rights era was being born.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.

I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.

My mother grew up during the sunset of British colonialism and attended English schools, where she was not allowed to be called Tin Swe Thant, but was instead required to have a Western 'school name.'

Surely, we've got a way that we can tinker with this system that shuttles our children from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

Police violence is the tip of the iceberg when it relates to the conditions overall of black people across the globe.

When you've been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.

People have been born in refugee camps and they are getting tired of that.

We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jails over and over again. And then you holler, 'Be patient.' How long can we be patient?