Quotes About Oppression

If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against.

Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It's not about the burka. It's about the coercion.

One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You're not destroying us. You are constructing us. It's yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz.

On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him, like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out.

The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power. The battle of the poor and the powerless is one of reclamation, not renunciation.

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.

All they have to do is to turn around and shoot. All the people have to do is to lie down and die.

That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous.

There is really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier. And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were a legitimate target.

They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

Are we] far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?

Un, kad m?s skat?mies pa logu, tad redzam tikai ?nas. Ka m??in?m ieklaus?ties, m?s dzirdam tikai ?ukstus. M?s nevaram saprast ?ukstus, jo m?su pr?tos ir iebrucis karš. Karš, kur? m?s esam uzvar?juši un zaud?juši Pats slikt?kais karš. Karš, kas sag?sta sap?us un tos p?rsap?o par jaunu. Karš, kas licis mums piel?gt m?su iekarot?jus un nicin?t pašiem sevi.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Filipino cleaning lady, the Indian jamardini, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other people's shit. She's used and abused at will.

The gist of it was the caste (privileged) hindus wanted the power to close the door on untouchables, but on no account could untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The Masters knew that Choice was Power.

Vi?ai izveidoj?s sp?c?ga netaisn?bas izj?ta un ietiep?gs, bezr?p?gs raksturs, k?ds rodas, tad, kad K?du Mazu visu m?žu sp?dzina K?ds Lielais. Vi?a neko nedar?ja, lai izvair?tos no str?diem un konfliktiem. Paties?bu sakot, vi?a tos pat mekl?ja, varb?t vi?ai tie pat patika.

The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was- the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck- was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of the caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.

And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

La maladie, ce n'est pas le terrorisme, c'est l'extrême injustice

For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.

There cannot be a more degrading system of social organisation than the caste system,' said Ambedkar. 'It is the system that deadens, paralyses and cripples the people from helpful activity.'19