Quotes About Oppression

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

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

'Mean to' don't pick no cotton.

If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.

A robin redbreast in a cage Sets all heaven in a rage.

When the white man came, we had the land and they had the bibles. Now they have the land and we have the bibles.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

Hereditary boundsmen! Know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

In a free country there is much clamor, with little suffering; in a despotic state there is little complaint, with much grievance.

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.

It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order.

fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

The power that is supported by force alone will have cause often to tremble.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast, The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.

The oppressed never free themselves-they do not have the necessary strengths.

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you cannot put an idea up against a barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.

The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.

You have to know the forces that are against you and that are trying to break you down. We talk about the problems facing the black community: the decimation of the black family; the mass incarceration of the black man; we're talking about the brutality against black people from the police. The educational system.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.