Quotes About Oppression

I mean, if you degrade someone, you isolate them, you control them, you call them names, you demean them. That's a horrible existence for people.

All over the world, there is someone sitting in a cell because he or she is not allowed freedom of expression.

But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant's grip — one's faculties rise in revolt — and one pays for outward calm with an almost unbearable inner struggle.

To minimize hatred and oppression, our love roots must be deep and solid.

Men who hit do so because they can...someplace they enjoy or need to humiliate another. There is no love in violence, only control and domination.

You were in your warm secure cave with enough food and your own woman while a storm and wild beasts raged outside. The shadows and shapes which seemed so solid at night evaporated in the daylight. You couldn't blot out the rest of the world during the day, it was everywhere, oppressive, top-heavy, leaning on you.

Equal rights meant just that, rights for both blacks and women, with the association working for both at the same time. Women should not be told to stand back and wait. [Frederick] Douglas said that women should be generous and allow the Negro to get his vote first. A young woman in the audience replied that she did not think it generous to compel women to yield on all questions ... simply because they are women.

I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken; and, notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and, without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet;—

Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex.

Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?

Ona protests, quietly, that she doesn't believe that at all. She doesn't believe in authority, period, because authority makes people cruel. Salome interrupts: The people with authority or the people without?

La Mariche Loewen alça la mà. […] Diu que opina que el més importat no és preguntar-se si les dones són animals sinó si les dones s'han de venjar del mal que se'ls ha fet. O bé si han de perdonar els homes i, amb això, aconseguir que se'ls obrin les portes del cel.

El més important no és preguntar-se si les dones són animals sinó si les dones s'han de venjar del mal que se'ls ha fet. O bé si han de perdonar els homes i, amb això, aconseguir que se'ls obrin les portes del cel.

En aquest seu afany de poder, en necessitaven d'altres sobre qui exercir aquest poder, i aquests altres som nosaltres.

Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book

because in their quest for power, they needed to have those they'd have power over, and those people are us. And they have taught this lesson of power to the boys and men of Molotschna, and the boys and men of Molotschna have been excellent students in that regard.

La Mariche no es pot reprimir més. Titlla l'Ona de somiadora. Som dones sense veu, puntualitza l'Ona, tranquil·la. Som dones sense temps ni lloc, fins i tot sense la llengua del país on vivim. Som mennonites sense pàtria. No tenim cap lloc on tornar, fins els animals de Molotschna estan més segurs a casa seva que nosaltres, les dones. Totes les dones tenim els nostres somnis… Així que, i tant que som somiadores.

L'autoritat fa que les persones siguin cruels.

A la hija pequeña de Salome, Miep, la violentaron los hombres entre dos y tres veces distintas, pero Peters ha prohibido que la niña, que tiene tres años, reciba tratamiento médico, alegando que el médico difundiría rumores sobre la colonia y la gente sabría lo de las agresiones y convertirían todo el incidente en un escándalo.

When people are kept in abject poverty and illiteracy while others grow rich and "develop their personalities" at the former's expense we speak of oppression; when structures and persons that perpetuate powerlessness are replaced by structures that allow people to stand on their own feet and have their own voice, we speak of liberation.2 Both

You humans are always locking each other away. Cells. Dungeons. Some of your earliest jails were sewers, where men sloshed in their own waste. No other creature has this arrogance—to confine its own. Could you imagine a bird imprisoning another bird? A horse jailing a horse? As a free form of expression, I will never understand it. I can only say that some of my saddest sounds have been heard in such places. A song inside a cage is never a song. It is a plea.

A major problem for victims of all empires is to identify so strongly with this role that they become double victims: victims of the empire, and victims of themselves.