Quotes About Oppression

They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy.

Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash, and at this the First Families were accomplished masters.

You'll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have.

El ojo humano es un instrumento maravilloso» -dije, citando Poemas y otras tergiversaciones -. «Con un pequeño esfuerzo no es capaz de ver las peores injusticias».

The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin.

Yet only a little more than $5 million—$1.25 per capita—was spent to compensate for 200 years of ignorance enforced on a whole transplanted people.

Vive América, Bolívar, y también vive tu espada mientras haya un solo esclavo que te ultraje o un tirano que pretenda profanar la libertad. Bolívar, America Lives! and your sword also lives so long as a single slave rapes your ideal or a tyrant tries to profane liberty. (From A Simon Bolívar / To Simon Bolívar)

Rio Grande de Loíza!... Río grande. LLanto grande. El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños, si no fuera mas grande el que de mí se sale por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo. Río Grande de Loíza!...Great river. Great flood of tears. The greatest of all our island's tears save those greater that come from the eyes of my soul for my enslaved people.

Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue.

We don't allow females.' 'I know. I don't want to put my foot across your poxy threshold… I'll try not to be too obviously female. I'll keep the swoonings to a minimum and promise I'll have only one fit of the vapours.' The footman curled his lip. 'You - the vapours! Ha! Brats like you can't afford that luxury.

Silent or gagged women are powerless women. A powerful woman is one who can speak out to challenge existing power structures or to explore previously taboo territory.

Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. 'The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep,' as they say.

Lenin found music depressing. Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music. Khrushchev despised music. Which is the worst for a composer?

The whole dream of democracy,' he wrote, 'is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.

Because the only way to resist, our husbands had taught us, was by not resisting.

We were moving because Eric's office had moved there, and commutes from Bay Ridge to Long Island City uncomfortably reminded us of Latin American immigrants knifed to death by bigots in subway cars en route to one of their three jobs at two in the morning.

It seemed to me it would be better to die standing up to a tyrant than to survive as a tool of his will.

But if you remove a tyrant in anything other than an open and visible way, another tyrant soon stands up to replace him.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life

increasingly weak. Then, half a century after Lord Macartney's failed mission, the closed door was pushed ajar by Britain through the Opium

It was not so much a feeling of being insulted, but an overwhelming pain for the people of my native land. We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves. I thought of the old observation that Chinese lives were cheap, and one Englishman's amazement that his Chinese servant should find a toothache unbearable.

Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.

It was Cixi who championed women's liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on its female population-a practice to which she put an end.

In China, one was accustomed to a certain amount of injustice