Quotes About Oppression

It is a bad habit of mind, a form of power-worship, to assume that things must be as they are, that they will continue to be as they have been. It soothes the conscience of the privileged, dulls the will of the oppressed. The first step toward change is the understanding that things can be different. This is my principal recommendation, then: we must recognize the possibility of a world without police.

Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?

Poverty was a soul-crushing thing. A cave that tightened around you, its pinprick of light closing a little more at the end of each desperate, unchanged day.

It isn't the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it's the troubles that cause the rebels.

Technically, the weight of pain is the weight of shadow.

In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity.

It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home.

If our opponent is to be made to comply with our will, we must place him in a situation which is more oppressive to him than the sacrifice which we demand; but the disadvantages of this position must naturally not be of a transitory nature, at least in appearance, otherwise the enemy, instead of yielding, will hold out, in the prospect of a change for the better.

There is something wrong in our country when a man can take away something that belongs to you and your family.

Humanity knows no bounds to its inhumanity when it puts systems in place that justify its injustices. Legally

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." —C.S. Lewis With

Me di cuenta de que podía soportarlo todo: el frío que calaba mis ropas gastadas, la tristeza de mi absoluta miseria, el sordo horror de aquella casa sucia. Todo menos su autoridad sobre mí. Era aquello lo que me había ahogado al llegar a Barcelona, lo que me había hecho caer en la abulia, lo que mataba mis iniciativas;

What the paper failed to recognize was that black people's willingness to work had never been the problem. Having to work for free, under backbreaking conditions and the threat of the lash, was the real issue.

The eighteenth-century origins of the "right to bear arms" explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not "carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever" unless "in the presence of some white person.

Jim Crow dominated the lives of black people in America from 1890 well into the twentieth century. From conception to coffin, there was no nook or cranny of a black person's life that it did not touch.

Even for Detroit's liberal mayor, peace was based on black people quietly and gracefully accepting the fact that they had no right to their rights.

White rage doesn't have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively. In my Washington Post op-ed, therefore, I set out to make white rage visible, to blow graphite onto that hidden fingerprint and trace its historic movements over the past 150 years.

White rage doesn't have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.

For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship.

The bottom line was that black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required black subordination.

In what can only be described as a travelogue of death, as he went from county to county, state to state, he conveyed the sickening unbearable stench of decomposing black bodies hanging from limbs, rotting in ditches, and clogging the roadways.46 White Southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-black violence that had reached "staggering proportions." Many urged the president to strengthen the federal presence in the South.47 Johnson refused,

If you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens." 5 He further denounced cops as "jack-booted government thugs [who have] more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us." 6

Equally vicious was the practice of "whitecapping," which, since the horrors of Bosnia and Srebrenica, we now recognize as ethnic cleansing: In several Georgia and Mississippi counties, where plantations did not dominate the economy, local whites maimed, murdered, and terrorized African Americans and, as the persecuted fled, seized all the land until one could "ride for miles and not see a black face.

Plantation owners were thus notorious for "barbarities such as scalding, burning, castrating, and extracting the tongues or eyes of slaves." 23 That combination of the insatiable desire for enormous profits coupled with the sadistic brutalization of bonded African labor created an overwhelming fear among whites of the enslaved's capacity and desire for retribution. And they needed to be fearful.