Quotes About Oppression

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.

Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence.

Slavery and rebellion are inseparable correlates. Hence, rivalry for power and exaggerated distrust pervade the entire organism from top to bottom.

I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow-sufferer.

Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an "accidental lack of perfection"—it would sound like mockery.

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. —Aung San Suu Kyi, "Freedom from Fear

THE WINDOWS Within these dark chambers, where I live through oppressive days, I pace up and down, trying to find the windows.-When a window opens, it will be a consolation. But the windows are not to be found, or I am unable to find them. And perhaps it's better that I don't. Perhaps the light will be a new tyranny. Who knows what novel things it will reveal.

How do you explain a world that gifts evil men with privilege and wealth and looks the other way while they torment and abuse the weakest members of society?

To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence. [referencing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own]

To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

It isn't really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn't want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society—more important, even, than honest or decent—is identifiable.

Would that the Roman people had a single neck [to cut off their head].

A maniac kills for his sense of "well-being." Rarely do we cure or re-educate the maniac. He dies, gets killed, or we put him in an asylum. The racists…have nothing to live for if their world crumbles...Wipe out the system of Negro oppression...and you automatically destroy the racist's sense of well-being.

it is rare, though, that a great wrong is committed by one people against another without some among the perpetrators protesting the deed.

When it defines man as the enemy, feminism is alienating women from their own bodies.

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.

With pencil, with chalk, with a brush I shall seek its form -- with my hands I shall model what tyranny deforms.

One thing I have noticed, child, is that tyrants are the grandest romantics. They can burn a heretic alive once day, and compose a love sonnet the next.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

When you are bred to be white trash, you do what you can to avoid the family trap.

One is struck again and again, in all the historical documents, by how small the Gestapo organisation really was, by how the Nazis repressed the entire German population with such a relatively small apparatus – particularly compared to, for example, the East German Stasi later in the same century. The Stasi employed more than 100,000 people to keep an eye on 17 million East Germans, while the Gestapo apparently needed no more than 40–60,000 for an empire of some 80 million

En toch. 'Opgroeien in deze hemel op aarde was als leven in een plastic zak,' schreef hij. 'Er heerste een verstikkend gevoel van opsluiting, alsof je voortdurend je eigen lucht inademde. Door te veel orde en te weinig risico's werd het leven benauwd en triviaal – en dat terwijl dit een wereld van vrijheid en ongekende kansen heette te zijn.