Quotes About Oppression

Our runaways may well be the backbone courageous among our kids: the ones who will risk hunger and forced prostitution and jail and death, in order to say NO to this overwhelming suffocation and victimizing, adult defeat into which they have been trapped, by dint of being born.

Do You Follow Me We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character.

No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed.

The capitan...one of those tall, arrogant, acerbically handsome niggers that most of the planet feels inferior to. Also one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated.

Quieres saber de verdad cómo se siente un X-Man?d Entonces conviértete en un muchacho de color, inteligente y estudioso, en un ghetto contemporáneo de Estados Unidos. ¡Mamma mía! Es como si tuvieras alas de murciélago o un par de tentáculos creciéndote en el pecho.

folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character.

Student today don't mean na', but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs—in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla—a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe.

I grew up in a post-dictatorship dictatorship society. The axis of likability is how dictatorships survive. Becoming popular is part of what dictatorships hijack to remain in power. For me to write things from the same toxic axis that made stronger the dictatorship that completely disfigured my family and my society, it just wasn't going to happen.

Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a dictator, but, he was a Dominican dictator, which is another way of saying he was the number-one bellaco in the country.

But this isn't human! When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You're the historian. You of all people should know that.

No hay nadie más opresor que el que ha sido oprimido.

He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.

It is true that in a world of high consumption, where anything and everything is possible, nothing is so humanizing as love, and a conscious interest in the life of others, particularly in the life of the oppressed. For love leaves us open to wounding and disappointment.

Sexism is #bigotryPRIME. All others are born of it.

You know, I've never asked why it doesn't offend your feminist principles for me to carry this beast for you." I look at it as exploiting the oppressor," she said, with a sweet smile.

Common folk suffer when kingdoms rise, Common folk suffer when kingdoms fall.

Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable.

Zombies are the proletariat. Long live the workers!

Of the people, by the people, for the people. I can't remember offhand where that quote comes from; it was something to do with some bunch of wild-eyed idealists overthrowing the tyrant so they could become tyrants themselves. No good will have come of it, you can be sure. The people; God help us.

I do housework," she said, "and I mend clothes. I'd do a proper job if I could. I'd have been a surgeon, like my father, except it's not allowed." He frowned. "It isn't?" "Of course not. Women can't be surgeons or clerks or lawyers or lecturers at Temple or merchants. There's not actually a law, but there doesn't have to be. People wouldn't stand for it.