Quotes About Oppression

I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote. A majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority. The political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

I understand that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him. ~Equality 7-2521 (as Prometheus), pg 98

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.

There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men (pg. 101).

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?

There is no such thing as the right to enslave.A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right. It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force (like soviet Russia), or by vote (like Nazi Germany).

The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If

To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.

I do not wish to work in a world that regards me as a slave.

The word We is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages

there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.

A battle? What battle? I hold the whip hand. I don't fight the disarmed. Are they? They have a weapon against you. It's their only weapon, but it's a terrible one. Ask yourself what it is, some time. Where do you see any evidence of it? In the unforgivable fact that you're as unhappy as you are.

Kada su zatvori ili prepuni, pobunjenici i štrajka?i bili su odvedeni u ?amce i zatim sa kamenom o vratu, stotine njih bilo je ba?eno u Volgu 12-14.marta bilo je strijeljano ili ugušeno izmedju 200-400. Procjene, nesigurne broja buržoaskih žrtava masakra u Astrakhanu osciliraju izmedju 600 - 1000 osoba. Za 1 sedmicu 3000-5000 bilo je pogubljeno ili ugušeno.

Public meetings, business meetings, encounters on the street, conversations, even posters on the wall all get wrapped up in an official language that doesn't contain a single word of truth. People in the West can't possibly understand what it is really like to lose the right to say what you think for years on end, and the way you have to repress the tiniest illegal thought you might have and stay silent as the tomb. That sort of pressure breaks something inside people.

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which

At the same time, was it not absurd to bleat about liberty when the province bought and sold Africans, "taken from all that is dear to them in their native soil"?

Any people who preferred "a wealthy villain" to "an honest upright man in poverty" deserved, Hancock lectured, to find itself oppressed.

With each effort to suppress the spirit of liberty, Great Britain managed only to promote it.

the subordinates had to behave that way; they were hiding from the victims in the hatred of them, but the hatred could not be produced in themselves except through acts of brutality.