Quotes About Oppression

The whole class system has oppressed so many people and given them such lack of opportunity. They are fed such strong narratives that this is where you belong and this is where you are.

During the early waves of the women's movement, lesbianism was seen as a political alternative, a decision not to give aid and comfort to the enemy (men). How could a woman be truly feminist, they asked, if she shared her life and bed with a man? (..) "For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture," wrote one woman, "is an act of resistance.

How do you force a man to fight – for freedom? The idiocy of it jarred him.

In a land where all slaves are servants, all servants are slaves, and thus ends democracy.

How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?

It is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim

It's just more mushroom farming, ain't it – keep us in the dark and feed us shit…

First oppression is made into an excuse for terrorism, and then terrorism is made into an excuse for oppression.

the downtrodden may yearn to be heard, but if a voice from a more privileged sphere speaks on their behalf, they'll roll their eyes and jeer at the voice's accent.

Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.

there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.

Le supplice ne rétablissait pas la justice, il réactivait le pouvoir.

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination ...

The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

The processes of objectification originate in the very tactics of power and of the arrangement of its exercise.

Il punto più intenso delle vite, quello in cui si concentra la loro energia, è proprio là dove si scontrano con il potere, si dibattono con esso, tentano di utilizzare le sue forze o di sfuggire alle sue trappole.

Là où il y a pouvoir, il y a résistance.

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth.

A democracy of knowledge has never existed , not because those who had knowledge possessed power, but because knowledge itself required humiliated bodies, including the bodies of those who possessed knowledge.

In our new world, patriarchy isn't only unjust. It is maladaptive.