Quotes About Oppression

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.

while we know the operation and the specific function of the totalitarian secret police, we do not know how well or to what an extent the 'secret' of this secret society corresponds to the secret desires and the secret complicities of the masses in our time.

Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.

The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts.

Needless to add, where men live in truly miserable conditions this passion for freedom is unknown.

The men of the first revolutions, though they knew well enough that liberation had to precede freedom, were still unaware of the fact that such liberation means more than political liberation from absolute and despotic power; that to be free for freedom meant first of all to be free not only from fear but also from want.

the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.

Beware of fascist feminism.

A habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.

I was a sharecropper's son. That's as low as you can get on the totem pole.

The topic of slavery is like an electric fence. Touch it and people will react.

So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.

I remember, growing up as a kid, history class was very washed-over. They didn't really get into the gritty bits of slavery. It's a very, very small section in the history books. It's not something they really touch on directly with American curriculums.

I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.

Touring a segregated America - forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most 'cos you don't realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person.

At a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration.

The organization and constant onward sweep of this movement exemplifies the resentment of the many toward the selfishness, greed and the neglect of the few.

I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.

It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.

I knew marriage was not the answer to changing the conditions for poor, black, queer folks. So I never felt compelled to get married - it just didn't seem important. But even if marriage wasn't right for me at the time, or a quick fix toward black empowerment, I found it repulsive that loving same-sex couples were refused the right.

Peace along with freedom and justice are the pillars for attaining both security and stability and will pave the way towards the eradication of oppression, extremism, and terrorism in our world.