Quotes About Oppression

Before I was married, I thought the sound of bangles jangling on my forearms would be delightful. I looked forward to being able to wear bells around my ankles and silver necklaces around my neck, but not any more, not since I had learned what they represented for the man who gave them. A necklace was no prettier than a piece of of rope that ties a goat to a tree, depriving it of freedom.

Battering, drunken husbands had their wives psychiatrically imprisoned as a way of continuing to batter them; husbands also had their wives imprisoned in order to live or marry with other women.

cumulative effect of being forced to lead circumscribed lives is toxic. The psychic toll is measured in anxiety, depression, phobias, suicide attempts, eating disorders, and such stress-related illnesses as addictions, alcoholism, high blood pressure, and heart disease

still behave as if they've been "colonized.

Colonization" exists when the colonized has valuable natural resources that are used to enrich the colonizer, but not the colonized: when the colonized does the colonizer's work, but earns little of the colonizer's money; when the colonized try to imitate or please the colonizer, and truly believe that the colonizer is, by nature, superior/inferior, and that the colonized cannot exist without her colonizer.

Perhaps most important, we need to support women who have fought back against their batterers and rapists and are wasting away in jail for daring to save their own lives. They are political prisoners and should be honored as such—not seen as pathological masochists who "chose" to stay until they "chose" to kill.

the Church is the merciless heart of the State.

To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it.

La historia de los pueblos que tienen una Historia es la historia de la lucha de clases. La historia de los pueblos sin Historia es, diremos con la misma verdad, la historia de su lucha contra el Estado.

Treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny.

He who punishes the vanquished fears not the victor.

If censorship reigns there cannot be sincere flattery, and only small men are afraid of small writings.

My childhood was not always a happy one because we had to visit our father in jail, as my father was often imprisoned by the Pakistani rulers.

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.

My issue with the state of women became incredibly stimulated when I was visiting developing countries and it became obvious that women bore the brunt of so many things in society.

It is vital to speak up in a democracy. Otherwise we are living in dictatorships.

What you and I understand as a government doesn't exist in many African countries. In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states. Vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is the problem in Africa.

Rereading 'Child 44' brought out the novel's meatier pleasures, its ability to create vivid characters in a world both alien to our own and chillingly recognizable.

It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.

The loudest voice in the room, sometimes, is the absent voice of the silenced.

We always talk about bullying, bullies; that is what social media is. It's just people we gave a voice to who didn't deserve to have a voice.

I have a voice, and I'm trying to use it to be the voice for all the innocent people who don't have one.

Those that have a voice have to speak for those of us who are silenced.