Quotes About Oppression

When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question.

The vast majority of the victims of the Southern Cone's terror apparatus were not members of armed groups but non-violent activists working in factories, farms, shantytowns and universities. They were economists, artists, psychologists and left-wing party loyalists. They were killed not because of their weapons (which most did not have) but because of their beliefs.

We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Stop calling me resilient. I'm not resilient. Because every time you say, 'Oh, they're resilient,' you can do something else to me." –Tracie Washington, New Orleans-based civil rights attorney, 2010

Simone de Beauvoir, writing on the same subject, concurred: "To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."24

In truth, nothing has done more to help build our present corporate dystopia than the persistent and systematic pitting of working-class whites against Blacks, citizens against migrants, and men against women. White supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia have been the elite's most potent defenses against genuine democracy.

The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution. This will be denied based on the only rationale possible; that those non-white and non-Christian people are lesser than, are the other, are dangerous invaders.

The vast majority of the victims of the Southern Cone's terror apparatus were not members of armed groups but non-violent activists working in factories, farms, shantytowns and universities. They were economists, artists, psychologists and left-wing party loyalists. They were killed not because of their weapons (which most didn't have) but because of their beliefs. In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the War on Terror was a war against all obstacles to the new order

We're cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they're really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

This wasn't about truth at all. The court didn't want truth, the king didn't want truth. Any truth I could give them, they could ignore as easily as the rest. It wouldn't change their minds.

The hot stifling room had gone even more stifling, a thickness like the worst days of summer, the air hot and moist under a smothering weight of still leaves that stopped the wind from ever getting through.

He made her give him gold just to live, as if she belonged to him because he was strong enough to kill her. My father was strong enough to kill me but that did not mean I belonged to him. He sold me for six kopeks, for three pigs, for a jug of krupnik.

there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot.

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

Women are told for so long that our feelings—our internal sensations of pain, pleasure, joy, sadness, or anger—are too much, or wrong, or bad. So eventually we can't stop thinking and thinking about these problems, trying to think them out, but we stop feeling our feelings about them.

the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.

The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power.

All labor systems that depend on coercing a work force into accepting bad conditions and unfair compensation have recognized the effectiveness of keeping that work force exhausted to keep it from making trouble.

The compulsion to imitate her is not something trivial that women choose freely to do to ourselves. It is something serious being done to us to safeguard political power. Seen in this light, it is inconceivable that women would not have to be compelled to grow thin at this point in our history.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us.

How can a woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay.

Todos os sistemas de trabalho que dependem da coação de uma mão de obra, forçando-a a aceitar condições más e remuneração injusta, reconheceram a eficácia de manter essa mão de obra exausta para impedir que ela se rebele.

From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and "communist" academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation's premier artists and writers had fled as well.11 The Nazi periodical The Nettle depicted this emigration as "a triumph for the German nation."12

When you are living under emergency measures, by definition you no longer have a functioning democracy. I say these days, "the coup has already taken place." What is stunning is how few people even now recognize the degree to which the country was living under dictatorial measures.