Quotes About Oppression

Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

We should not underestimate that: the Chinese people's ignorance. Thousands of years of despotism had been such a poison that their understanding of modern politics is even inferior to that of the black slaves and other immigrants.

The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.

Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.

There are some societies where women are not even allowed to drive a car, and that restriction is based in the name of religion and tradition. There are other countries where a woman can be punished if she does not cover her head.

Women become the objects of rules; they are repressed and lose their rights in the name of religion, or they lose their freedom in the name of tradition, while the state legitimates this foolishness with laws.

Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.

After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.

Selling out Saudi women is an old-established tradition.

In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.

I grew up in a very difficult country, a very oppressive situation because of the Somoza dictatorship. My family was in opposition to Somoza; Somoza was a liberal, and my family were conservatives. These were the two traditional parties in Nicaragua.

We pride ourselves on our democratic traditions, but in Canada, women couldn't vote until 1918, Asians until 1948, and First Nations people living on reserves until 1960.

Some girls cannot go to school because of the child labor and child trafficking.

Some of the worst racist tragedies in history have been perfectly legal.

One of the advantages of appearing in such a play is that you begin to understand it properly, I feel Ophelia's tragedy was that she had been so used by everybody and felt that she bore a great burden of guilt.

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

North Korean defectors who speak out against the regime always feel nervous. We never know what the North Korean government is planning. It's really difficult for us to show our faces and speak out, but we feel obligated to do something to inform people about the ongoing tragedy inside North Korea.

I know the truth of North Korea. The oppression and their tragedy. It cannot be silenced.

For the last ten years, I've been trying to avoid getting killed by Putin's regime, and there already exists a trail of dead bodies connected to its desire to see me dead.

We are taught to attack the forces of evil and not those doing evil. That is what we are trained in.

Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains our minds to think critically and to question what you are told. This is why dictators censor or ban books. It's why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. It's why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces when they walk to school.

A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.