Quotes About Oppression

the love of beauty above the human is fascism

So Hobart and Harriett get their house burned down? What's next--a lynching?" Mrs. Bates jerked the bucket from the woman next to her. "I've seen a body swingin'. Three times in my life," her husband said, his voice low. For a moment, except for the roaring of the smoky flames, everyone went quite. Stella wondered how silence could be so loud.

churches were bombed, houses were burned, people were lynched.

God damn it, you sang, in your chains, for every thief crucified, for every King and X hash-hashinated, for every Shepard hung by butcher birds from the wire, for every whole note hung by its rope from the score... gnashing lies till they were dead, shaking the lies' bodies to be sure they did not twitch

My mother's people came here yearning to sing to their God, to breathe free, men and women attacked by their landlords, who called them wretched refuse, teeming with vermin. They'd pushed off from that shore, homeless on the ocean, through calm and tempest

When the farmer beats his wife who beats the dog who beats the cat who beats the mouse, who does the mouse beat? She does not beat her young. Maybe she beats the catskin drum.

where did I think the rich got their money but from everyone else?

Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.

It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India's sweltering heat, even today.

for Jia Bao's storyline, I drew on the experiences of Peng Ming-Min, Henry Liu, and Chen Wen-cheng to understand the various legal and extralegal mechanisms the KMT government used to control its challengers, particularly from abroad.

Thousands of husbands disappeared in those weeks. Sons as young as twelve. Brothers. Friends. What better way to remake society, my mother thought, than to eliminate the teachers and principals, the students, the lawyers and doctors—truly, anybody who had an opinion and a voice? Beyond the river, execution grounds, field after field irrigated with blood, waited to be discovered. Buildings would crush the bones.

No Taiwanese" was the first rule, which Zhee Hyan, my second brother, had learned slowly and painfully. Under the government's plan to unify the people with a national language, every syllable of Taiwanese spoken at school brought punishment from the teacher. Taiwanese was for home; Mandarin was for the world. My brother's hands turned purple with beatings until he finally learned to reflexively clench his mouth before a Taiwanese word slipped out.

Indiscriminate firing by police on people is absolute barbarism. Instead of solving their problems, the government is trying to suppress the people by force.

Huge amounts of blood were shed to make and maintain the Soviet Union. Some of it was the blood of idealists, some of thugs and careerists, but most of it was the blood of ordinary people whose main concern was survival.

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.

Patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet, and its essential message is necrophilia. All of the so-called religions legitimating patriarchy are mere sects subsumed under its vast umbrella/canopy. All— from buddhism and hinduism to islam, judaism, christianity, to secular derivatives such as freudianism, jungianism, marxism, and maoism— are infrastructures of the edifice of patriarchy.

Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.

This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

women's bodies are "inferiorised, stigmatized . . . within an overarching patriarchal ideology. For example, biologically and physiologically, women's bodies are seen as both disgusting in their natural state and inferior to men's'' (2001, p. 141).

Women exercise agency in order to survive the power relations and oppressive circumstances in which they find themselves. The theoretical task, Miriam argues, is for radical feminist theory to 'theorize freedom in terms of women's collective political agency (power to): this task requires an understanding that freedom is not negotiating within a situation taken as inevitable, but rather, a capacity to radically transform and/or determine the situation itself'.

Women and girls cannot access full humanity and the rights and opportunities of full human status while the idea that there are personality traits and appearance norms that are naturally and essentially associated with girls and women still has social currency and serves to control and limit their lives.