Quotes About Oppression

since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

The Strong do what they Can, and the Weak Suffer what they Must.

But there is more – to rebel against what will not let life be.

She kept too much in herself. Her life was such that she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. Let her be. So, all that is in her will not bloom, but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know, help make it so there is cause for her to know that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

Adolf Hitler despised smoking. The Führer was no doubt pleased when German doctors discovered that cigarettes caused cancer. For obvious reasons, though, "hated by Nazis" was no impediment to the popularity of tobacco.

few slaves had been captured;

We relied on the slave labor of African peoples to build the levees that protected our homes and farmland, to harvest and cook our food, to care for our children, to chop, and hoe, and sweat, and sew, and nurse us back to health, while we aspired to be persons of leisure, or at least to leave the really brutal work to them.

South where I grew up. In large measure, this reflected a racial and gender caste system that denied most other opportunities to African American women. That system was designed to ensure a ready supply of cheap black labor, especially for the Southern ruling classes that emerged out of slavery's old planter class. But the privilege of exploiting black labor extended even to fairly lowly whites; textile mill hands and poor farmers, for example, frequently employed their black

What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.

Rather than arrest the assailant, white police officers hauled off a black bystander who objected to their inaction.

Milam and Bryant were not on a political mission when they pounded on Moses Wright's door, and they did not kidnap Emmett Till beneath the banner of states' rights, racial integrity, or white supremacy. The white men carried out their brutal errand in an atmosphere created by the Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the mass of white public opinion, all of which demanded that African Americans remain the subservient mudsill of Mississippi—or die.

According to William Bradford Huie, Milam later justified Till's lynching using the terms of violent racial and sexual politics: Just as long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government

People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.

Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.

They beat hell out of you for any reason or no reason. It's the greatest pleasure of their lives.

And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without

A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which the slave may be whipped at any time," wrote Douglass

But it would be more precise to say that the master aimed to transform the slave into an automaton by obliterating his sense of personhood.

His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would "spoil the best nigger in the world," and "unfit him to be a slave.

Hugh Auld was wise to fear slave literacy. Reading could kindle in a slave a desire for learning and for a personal future, thus undermining slavery's consistent effort to stamp out any sense of self-worth.

All who hold positions of power fear or hate someone. Or something." Arihnda

The fear of the violent and the lawless is no less a tyranny than the edicts that come from the Emperor's throne.

They are a terrible enemy, Eli," Vah'nya said. "Your Empire—your former Empire—forces its will on its slaves through soldiers and weapons and warships. But the Grysks…three can command a nation. A hundred can rule an entire world. Billions of beings, their hearts and souls broken, ready to fight and die at the order of a handful of aliens. No resistance, no revolt, no dissent, no hope.

All who hold positions of power fear or hate someone.