Quotes About Oppression

Wherever caste lives, wherever class power exists, whether it be on the Thames or on the Seine, whether on the Ganges or on the Danube, there the South has an ally.… Never until we welcome the Negro, the foreigner, all races as equals, and melted together in a common nationality, hurl them all at despotism, will the North deserve triumph or earn it at the hands of a just God.

For centuries, European explorers had set out for new lands without using expressions like pharaoh and promised land, New Covenant and New Israel, Exodus and Moses. By choosing these evocative lyrics, the founders of America introduced the themes of oppression and redemption, anticipation and disenchantment, freedom and law, that would carry through four hundred years of American history. Because of them, the story of Moses became the story of America.

Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.

The rich become rich by taking, and the poor by giving.

is intended to break the spirit, to render harmless those who are thought to be harmful.

What evidence do you have that the black people in your country are ready to rise against the regime? A true revolution begins from the soil, from the grass roots. It is the final cry of despair from the ground up. Have you heard the cry "freedom?

Enquanto voltava para o quarto, ocorreu a Nnu Ego que ela uma prisioneira: aprisionada pelo amor por seus filhos, aprisionada pelo papel de esposa mais velha. Dela, não se esperava nem que pedisse mais dinheiro para a família, essa atitude seria considerada inferior ao padrão esperado de uma mulher em sua posição. Não era justa, ela achava, o modo como os espertos dos homens usavam o sentido de responsabilidade de uma mulher para escravisá-la na prática.

Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity.

The concept of whiteness could cover a multitude of sins.

She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks.

Democracy doesn't work, Christianity doesn't work, nor Atheism, Nothing works but the gun and the man on top.

All the law is not in the hands of Giant Despair.

It is the untold story of this war and it is the story of every war ever fought. Greedy men seeing someone weaker with something they want.

It seems a universal rule in this world that people will always look for victims and scapegoats, does it not? Especially at times of difficulty and tension.

Religion is a thing of the past, the Party said, an instrument of oppression that keeps the common man in bondage.

Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman's sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy.

The children of the grove owners, oppressed by the placidity of . . . Redlands, have begun to leave the area.

Literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. But there are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.

To make a contented slave,' [Frederick] Bailey later wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.

Censoring] knowledge, telling people what they must think and what ideas are impermissible, which lines of evidence may not be pursued, is the aperture to thought police, foolish and incompetent decision-making, and long-term decline.

The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.

We are, almost all of us, descended from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about unpredictable or disgruntled deities. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations [...]. For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods.

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.

In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.