Quotes About Oppression

am I inferior simply because I am not English born? Am I to be a slave because I am an Indian?

Gandhi was warning that in a nation which honoured killing, the weak would be bullied by the well-armed, the well-heeled and the strong-bodied.

400 mutineers were hanged simultaneously, while British officers seated beneath sipped whiskies and sodas and regimental bands played.

Rule Punjab and the rest of India as a superior race, dismissing any notion of equality between rulers and subjects

Lahore Conspiracy Case, as it was called, contains no Muslim name and only one Sikh name, that of Bhagat Singh.

White Punjabis like Nicholson often took a close and continuing interest in a servant or subordinate, but other 'subjects' were usually ignored and no 'subject' was seen as an equal.

In some villages near Allahabad, British soldiers killed aged men, women and children for alleged association with the rebels. Many were simply 'burnt to death'.

In the 1840s, these three armies contained around 40,000 whites and 250,000 Indians. No white served under an Indian, and the highest paid Indian earned less than the lowest paid Briton.

God said, I am tired of kings,I suffer them no more;Up to my ear the morning bringsThe outrage of the poor.

Every attempt through history to limit the definition of humanity has been a prelude to the subjugation, degradation, and slaughter of innocents.

When had terrorists ever accomplished anything but to enrage people, drive them towards greater security, greater sacrifice of freedom? They only gave their oppressors more excuses for oppression. And the oppressors just drove the oppressed further towards violent rebellion. Extremists on both sides gave power to the very forces they fought against.

The worst atrocities… Maybe half of them arose directly because the powerful had a monopoly or a near-monopoly on some key capability.

A reminder that for some people in this world, freedom and ordinary aren't basic rights. They're luxuries you should never take for granted.

Trouble is, George Washington is not my ancestor, private or public. He owned my ancestors, abused them as chattel and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death. I and mine need to know about George and Martha but, assuredly, we do not need to revere them. Indeed, psychically we cannot afford to revere them.

Until America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people.

No race, no ethnic or religious group, has suffered so much over so long a span as blacks have, and do still, at the hands of those who benefited, with the connivance of the United States government, from slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that followed it. It is a miracle that the victims–weary dark souls long shorn of a venerable and ancient identity–have survived at all, stymied as they are by the blocked roads to economic equality.

This book is about the great still-unfolding massive crime of official and unofficial America against Africa, African slaves, and their descendants in America.

At long last, let America contemplate the scope of its enduring human-rights wrong against the whole of a people. Let the vision of blacks not become so blighted from a sunless eternity that we fail to see the staggering breadth of America's crime against us.

As Germany and other interests that profited owed reparations to Jews following the holocaust of Nazi persecution, America and other interests that profited owe reparations to blacks following the holocaust of African slavery which has carried forward from slavery's inception for 350-odd years to the end of U.S. government–embraced racial discrimination–an end that arrived, it would seem, only just yesterday.

No nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines, begun parallel and left alone, can never touch.

While there were those like Thomas Paine who found the whole business of the slave trade abhorrent, they were far outnumbered by slaveholders who, among other things, forced female slaves into sexual service.

African Americans must spiritually survive from the meager basket of a few mean yesterdays. No chance for significant group progress there. None. For we have been largely overwhelmed by a majority culture that wronged us dramatically, emptied our memories, undermined our self-esteem, implanted us with palatable voices, and stripped us along the way of the sheerest corona of self-definition.

Come out. Come out. Wherever you are. Monstrous systems do turn people into monsters. Every day. All the time. With unerring efficiency. But those in our society who hallucinate somewhere blithely in the upper reaches of its class remove, prefer not to know this. Oh, I think they know it, but whenever possible they elect not to think about it. Not to see it.

The devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth's only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity.–The Autobiography of Malcolm X