Quotes About Oppression

They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The laboring classes were to be kept at bay. The electoral college, the original power of the states to appoint senators, and the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic.

But then the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence.

Capitalist states seek to keep workers unconscious, Gramsci wrote, because no worker under a capitalist system will ever receive the full amount for his or her labor. This would destroy capitalism. Any worker who truly understood his or her interests would be dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

The Mississippi of 1920 was an exceptionally dangerous place for Black people. But my grandfather deeply believed in helping create opportunities to African-Americans to lift themselves up to create a better life for their families and doing everything possible to bring his people together.

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires!

DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress.

I think enslavement has evolved to what may seem appropriate to this day's generation. Modern enslavement is imprisonment.

In our modern age - in the age of free information - I don't think there is any place for dictatorships.

Guys like the Monarch are not unique, and there are guys like him all over the world torturing dumb scientists.

The active fighters can't speak up or they will be fired. Because this monopoly doesn't allow for a free market. We have to free the fighters so they can fight wherever they want.

We should have sent the apartheid monsters to jail, not let them off with an amnesty.

You're going to relegate my history to a month.

What I think I learned from working on 'Moonlight' is you see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves.

So here we are, just two months away from the election, with more and more examples that modern day Jim Crowe laws are alive and well in the state of Florida.

If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.

An estimated 60,000 out of the 80,000 Herero were in fact killed before the general was recalled to Berlin.122

attained democracy, as brutal dictatorships took over, led to the cynical phrase: One man, one vote-one time.

slavery was a worldwide institution, entrenched on every inhabited continent, subjugating people of every color, language, and religion

Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth--that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud.

You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

for it has always been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.