Quotes About Oppression

For many people of color, learning to break the silence is a survival issue. To remain silent would be to disconnect from her own experience, to swallow and internalize her own oppression.The cost of silence is too high.

Children who have been silenced often enough learn not to talk about race publicly. Their questions don't go away, they just go unasked.

The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging the complicity in the oppression of others.

In a situation of unequal power, a subordinate group has to focus on survival. It becomes very important for the subordinates to become highly attuned to the dominants as a way of protecting themselves from them.

The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others.

The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others. Our ongoing examination of who we are in our full humanity, embracing all of our identities, create the possibility of building alliances that may ultimately free us all.

working sugar was by far the most brutal work a slave could be assigned. Most died by the age of twenty-five from infections caused by the serrated leaves, snakebite from the venomous snakes lurking in the fields, and heat exhaustion from having to stir the cane down to syrup in vats heated underneath by flames

Eddy dreamed of owning her own restaurant. It was a common belief that women like her, the descendant of slaves, had no right to dream.

Do all the people here feel as you do about the Indians?" "Some do, but the big cattle ranchers don't. They own the land now and it's made them rich. They don't care if the tribes are fenced in, starving, and destitute, as long as they can ship their beef. Anything else?

Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society.

Trust not in oppression, and become not vain in robbery: if riches increase, set not your heart upon them.

For he will rescue the poor who cry for help, Also the lowly one and whoever has no helper. He will have pity on the lowly and the poor, And the lives of the poor he will save. From oppression and from violence he will rescue them, And their blood will be precious in his eyes.

He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.

It is God's own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunate enough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enough to have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business and affairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that they show to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds.

If you was white, should be all right,If you was brown, could stick around,But as you's black, whoa brother,Get back, get back, get back.

What do we hope to accomplish? What will help us realize our deepest dreams and desires? In what ways is education liberating, and in what ways can schooling be entangling and oppressive? Can learning be cast as a creative act, enjoyable and social, or is it always framed as competitive and brutal? What does it mean to be an educated person? What does it mean to be free? Awakened to fundamental and forbidden questions, a new world of possibilities heaves into view.

It's all about money, not freedom, y'all, okay? Nothing to do with fuckin' freedom. If you think you're free, try going somewhere without fucking money, okay?

If you wall a country or a civilization, you misshape it, too, as certainly as if you strangled it with bindings. You have built the wall not just outside but inside, and what you have walled up will be grotesque and stunted, whether you look at it from the moon or elsewhere.

The enemy is empowered by human agreement. To agree with anything he says gives him a place to kill, steal, and destroy. We fuel the cloud of oppression by agreeing with our enemy. Praise, with rejoicing, cancels that agreement.

Editorial cartooning] is essentially a destructive art. We are not pontificators, or molders of thought—or at least we shouldn't try to be. Ours is more the role of the lowly gadfly: circle and stab, circle and stab. Roughly put, our credo should be, if it's big, hit it.

Lincoln said that cultivating even 'the smallest quantity' of ground bred freedom and independence. 'Ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of oppression of any of its forms. Such community will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.

Revolution without revelation is tyranny.

secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of

Hell, I doubt if they even knew [that] Russia, just less than a hundred years ago, owned Finland, sucked the blood out of Poland, and were using Siberia as a prison for their own people. How Stalin must have sneered when he got through with them at all those phony conferences."1