Quotes About Oppression

This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence.

In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier.

In capitalist countries a multitude of sermonizers, counselors, and "confusion-mongers" intervene between the exploited and the authorities.

Fatalism relieves the oppressor of all responsibility since the cause of wrong-doing, poverty, and the inevitable can be attributed to God.

He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.

The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.

When we revolt it's not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe

For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.

And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.

The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.

When people like me, they like me "in spite of my color." When they dislike me; they point out that it isn't because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle.

Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

But by any broad human rights criteria, the republican regimes of the region were responsible for far more killing, brutality, oppression and, often, corruption and theft of the people's wealth than were the monarchies. Between, on the one side the Shah of Iran, Nuri Said of Iraq and King Faruq of Egypt and, on the other, the Islamic Republic, the Iraqi Ba'th Party and the militaristic junta that has ruled Egypt since 1952, there is no comparison.

Nazi street gangs launched increasingly violent attacks against Hitler's enemies, especially leftists and Jews. As one historian put it, "To ready the ground for the Nazi rise to ultimate power, the party raised the level of violence witnessed by ordinary Germans with each passing month.

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?

In Spain, we should have enough intelligence, enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship.

Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without planting up the ground. They want rain without thunder or lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may not be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July I answer A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppos

I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.