Quotes About Oppression

Christina Hoff Sommers quotes one professor's compliant about "students who have been trained to take a 'feminist perspective'": "For them reason itself is patriarchal, linear, and oppressive." In other words, Women's Studies agrees with the Victorians that women are the less intellectual sex; the difference is that in the view of Women's Studies this doesn't make them inferior but superior.

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.

Throughout the South, one out of every three children born into slavery died before reaching his or her first birthday; a white infant's chance of surviving was twice as good.50 Conditions were even harsher in the rice and sugar districts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.

It was the nearly universal determination of southern whites to keep blacks subordinate that ultimately proved to be the secessionists' strongest card.

Owning other human beings outright shaped the very core of the typical planter's personality. At home, after all, they were at once employers, legislators, policemen, prosecutors, judges, juries, jailers, and executioners.

was] at home accumulating for the benefit of his master"?49 In the hill country of northern Alabama, farmer James Bell cautioned his son Henry in April 1861 not to be seduced by the rhetoric of the South's large "Negroholders." "All they want," the elder Bell advised, "is to git you pupt up and go fight for there infurnal negroes and after you do there fighting you may kiss there hine parts for o they care.

In 1860, nearly all whites regarded African Americans as inherently inferior, degraded, and dangerous, and found the idea of living alongside them as anything like equals simply inconceivable.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship, and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

We don't think the way they want us to," the girl said. "And they'll kill us for it. But not until we've pried the worldskull open and put our needles in.

Guys who were all Papa Docs and Step-pin' Razors and Whippin' Sticks.

History is not the glory of the winners, it is the weapon of the losers

Chrystus jest komiwoja?erem, p?atnym agentem wyzyskiwaczy.

Nothing is wanted but money, and negros are necessary to make it. —Stephen F. Austin, 1832

The net result of the fall on the economic, political, and religious systems is that they become the places where people learn to play god in the lives of the poor and the marginalized. When fallen human beings play god in the lives of others, the results are patterns of domination and oppression that mar the image and potential productivity of the poor while alienating the non-poor from their true identity and vocation as well.

The poor are poor largely because they live in networks of relationships that do not work for their well-being. Their relationships with others are often oppressive and disempowering as a result of the non-poor "playing god" in the lives of the poor.

If you are competing with slaves, then you are a slave yourself.

Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing." —Audre Lorde

The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.

Before I spoke, the general talk was drifting to women's emancipation, birth control in the Third World, and how the Third World women were suffering. I don't know why I hated people talking about us like that......... So I got up and shocked all those ladies, telling them to mind their own business and leave us Third World women alone. One could have heard a pin drop. I thought at one time I would be thrown out. But I was not.

All people seem to do is the best they can to get along and have a good time; and if that means keeping what they've got, they're liable to become fascists; and if it means trying to get what they need and don't have, there's a good chance of their learning the Internationale.

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.

The poorest being that crawls the earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.