Quotes About Oppression

Southern law enforcement people were even worse: the descendants of the paddyrollers and overseers who'd made their living grinding her kind into fertilizer in the cotton fields of slavery.

She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?

She remembered the wanted posters for Joanne Little, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. She blushed at putting herself in such important company, then wondered if the sheriff's office appreciated the distinction.

Today's national movements, women's and blacks', seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.

Caligula ne demiÅŸti? Oderint dum meduant. Bizden korktuklar? sürece, b?rak?n bizden nefret etsinler.

The horrors—ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution—once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference. We denounce those who order it, we condemn the people who carry out the policies, calling them inhumane. But the behavior is fully human. We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.

Justice is less easily applied to the strong than to the defenseless.

I can see your dirtypillows.

the former colony itself becoming colonialist.

He projected American power through regional allies like Iran, Zaire, and Indonesia, and turned a blind eye as dictators in those countries oppressed and looted with abandon.

We used to be the fucker," one of Anaconda's lawyers lamented. "Now we're the fuckee.

When armed squads confiscated eight bulls, seven cows, four calves, three horses, thirty-six tons of wheat, a cart, a threshing machine, and a mill from B. Bondarenko of Aktyubinsk province, while sentencing him to a year in prison, he asked the presiding judge to provide an explanation for the basis of his conviction because he was not guilty of a crime.

Sergei Nechayev (1847–82), the son of a serf and the founder of the secret society the People's Retaliation, had observed in 1871, "Everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.

With his manifold instruments of personal power, he was mercilessly hounding all those who expressed differences of opinion with him, but he was always the victim.

A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can—depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices—institutionalize the gravest injustices.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

A woman from the audience asks: 'Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?' and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: "There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the '50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.

The bed sheet brigade is bad enough, but the real threat to Americans and human rights today is the plain clothes Klux in the halls of government and certain black-robed Klux on court benches.

Communism's entire existence depended on coercion.

La población negra resultó más perjudicada por el crack que por ninguna otra causa desde las leyes discriminatorias conocidas como Jim Crow.

Some would even support the reopening of the African slave trade so that men like them could expand their labor force and non-slaveholders might have the opportunity to join the slaveholding class.

Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology—that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. It led to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice was to hurry this dialectical process along, and allow the oppressed working classes to carry out their struggle against their bourgeois oppressors

People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors' conscience.