Quotes About Oppression

Despotism despieses nothing so much as righteousness in its victims

The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.

But repression, they say, breeds resistance in some men, and I was resisting the world with every minute of my life.

You understand and accept it when the bad guys work you over. But when the good guys use handcuffs to chain you to a wall, and then take turns to stomp and kick you, it's the whole system, it's the whole world, that's breaking your bones. And then there was the screaming. The other men, the other prisoners, screaming. Every night.

All political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor.

Then the smoulders of shame and guilt flamed into anger, became fist-tightening rage at the unfairness of it: What kind of a government, I thought, what kind of a system allows suffering like this?

Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims.

Non so cosa mi spaventa di più: il potere che ci schiaccia o la nostra infinita capacità di sopportarlo.

The fairytale belongs to the poor. I know of no fairytale which upholds the tyrant or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairytale is an absurdity.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.

In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.

Rights compliance helps effective outcomes, it does not hinder them. That should come as no surprise because the 'human rights' in the Human Rights Act are the rights adopted in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war, and are designed to protect all of us from oppression.

One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars - all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.

Being a black male in the Deep South after World War II, you could actually come home in your uniform and be lynched on the spot or be connected to some horses and buggies and dragged on the street in front of your wife and children.

There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.

Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.

Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.

If you're running a dictatorship, you don't really have to worry about the welfare or the property rights of the ordinary citizen. Only the people who keep you in power, a very small group, matter.

I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one's soul little by little, day after day, is a lot worse than someone coming in your house and lynching you.