Quotes About Oppression

men who so uneasily tolerate superiors patiently suffer a master, and show themselves proud and servile at the same time.

It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into a revolution. It happens most often that a people, which has supported without complaint, as if they were not felt, the most oppressive laws, violently throws them off as soon as their weight is lightened

Those who define themselves by their sense of superiority will live in a world governed not by justice but by persecution, one in which the tables may turn on them without a moment's notice.

Nazi realm. Japan continued its brutal and genocidal war against the Chinese; and in Russia, Stalin was presiding over show trials, deporting thousands to Siberia, and summarily executing his rivals in the Communist party. The Spanish

It's easier to robe the poor.

The world is full of interiors that bleach the spirit. Hospitals, police stations, job centres, local government offices and prisons all have their own subtle type of vampire colour scheme and black-hole furnishing, capable by accident or design of wiping away a person's self-esteem and will to resist, like boiled-over soup off a ceramic hob.

As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes. Moreover, the faithful are usually willing to risk their skins in whatever military adventure their government may currently be promoting.

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.

It is dullness and not evil that begets totalitarianism.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.

I'd prefer to have dangerous freedom, than have peaceful slavery

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don't have anything else.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below.

Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed, she said, and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.