Quotes About Oppression

True virtue never looks so lovely as when it is most oppressed, and the divine excellence of real Christianity is never demonstrated as clearly as when it faces trials.

I'm going to tell you something," Ali said, "and I don't want you ever to forget it . . . Black men scare white men more than black men scare black men

In an essay for the Saturday Review, a magazine that appealed to economically comfortable, upper-middlebrow readers, King wrote: "The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky; they cast light on the imperfections in the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.

Stalin's Russia was a trap, in which even those running the system were caught. The leaders were trapped by fear of Stalin and even he was trapped by his fear of their desire to be rid of him. Everything he had to eat or drink had to be tasted by one of his colleagues first. Beria's behavior at his death showed that his fear was only partly paranoia.

Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: 'Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred.

Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can't take good news, they can't accept good news.

And if the love of political equality rests on the Liberty/oppression and Care/harm foundations rather than the Fairness/cheating foundation, then the Fairness foundation no longer has a split personality; it's no longer about equality and proportionality. It is primarily about proportionality.

Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression.

sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

The hatred of oppression is found on both sides of the political spectrum. The difference seems to be that for liberals—who are more universalistic and who rely more heavily upon the Care/harm foundation—the Liberty/oppression foundation is employed in the service of underdogs, victims, and powerless groups everywhere.

But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.48 The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.

The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

Justice is what the strong do the weak.

The termagant who had dragged him out on long, boring walks, who had tried in vain to censor his reading, who had labeled him an impious liar and criminal, was dead at last, and the boy, hearing a servant say 'she has passed away', sank to his knees on the kitchen floor to thank God for so great a deliverance.

Then as now, demonization of the victim is the necessary precondition for genocide.

Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it.

What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors - the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life.

Changing one's undergarments on Saturday, for example, was sufficient evidence to justify the arrest and interrogation under torture of a New Christian on charges of being a secret Jew.

What the men in black did to their victims with such tools was not a crime.

Evil exists," he says, not flinching at the word. "I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people-that is my idea of evil.

Ve stát? jako je ten náš , m?l každý p?id?lenou roli: ty jsi ob??, a ty, ty jsi kat, a nikdo nem?l na vybranou, nikoho se neptali, jestli je s tím srozum?n, protože všichni byli zam?nitelní, ob?ti i katové.

People are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once, but gradually, by one encroachment after another, as it is found they are disposed to bear them.

That place I'm talking about ain't nothing but a bloody slit in this world of His. But everybody wants to rule over it. It ain't for the white man to rule. Ain't for any man to rule.

Calming ain't curing, is it, girl?" the woman asked aloud. "Keeping you hushed might keep me out of jail, but sure as the world, calming ain't curing.