Quotes About Oppression

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.

That is often the way of the oppressor. He cannot understand the simple fact that people want to be free. So, when a man resists oppression, they pass it off by calling him "crazy" or "insane.

During the five years since the Party had been formed, it always seemed that time was measured not in days or months or hours but by the movements of comrades and brothers in and out of prison and by the dates of hearings, releases, and trials. Our lives were regulated not by the ordinary tempo of daily events but by the forced clockwork of the judicial process (330)

James Baldwin has pointed out that the United States does not know what to do with its Black population now that they "are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred, like cattle." This country especially does not know what to do with its young Black men.

denounced in a summary trial, the name called out, giving a reason why they no longer fitted into the national vision, before their books were committed to the fire. All this was being broadcast by radio around the nation.

While he managed to escape, they remain burdened by the history of their once colonized country, by the theft of the landscape on which their ancestors walked. The ground beneath their feet did not belong to them until they achieved independence in 1960, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The country had been plundered, some of its most precious works of art taken to museums in London and never returned. The people themselves were stolen to be sold as slaves.

Every day a person is born in Gaza into an open-air prison, in the West Bank without civil rights, in Israel with an inferior status by law, and in neighboring countries effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, like their parents and grandparents before them, solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish.

Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has pursued an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians throughout the territory it controls. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.

Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.

The focus should be on Indian atrocities in Kashmir, not on our support for the Kashmiri resistance.

No sooner did I start college than President Park Chung-hee's Yushin dictatorship began. Everything was in turmoil, and not a day went by without riots and school closures. My classmates were being arrested left and right, and every time I went to class, there were fewer and fewer of them.

We stopped telling our stories in detail, but whenever the subject of our home countries came up, it always seemed to end in fighting and starvation and disease and brutal, fearful generals seizing power. There were still so many people dying in every corner of the world, and people crossing endless borders in search of food, just so they could live without the constant threat of death.

The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.

bullies the light out of the room.

It is the world that shapes people's minds. It is men who have shaped the world. So women's minds are shaped by men. From earliest childhood, the world they see is made by men. Now the women lie to themselves and there is confusion and unhappiness everywhere.

Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring.

The settlement was defending itself." "By shooting us and throwing bombs at us even though we're unarmed?

they knew they were slaying Peterson by their endurance just as he was slaying them with his cruelty.

The British response to the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising between 1936 and 1939 was devastating. Britain stormed all of Palestine once more, killing more than five thousand Palestinians and wounding more than fifteen thousand others. It exiled and executed the Palestinian leadership. In addition, it organized death squads made up of British soldiers and Zionist forces known as 'special night forces,' which attacked Palestinian villages by night and killed many Palestinians.