Quotes About Oppression

Years ago women were nothing, Eloisa. They had no rights. They couldn't own property. They were property. That changed because it wasn't right. Children were beaten regularly by parents. That changed because it wasn't right. Just because something is tradition, handed down from one generation to the next, doesn't make it right.

Two people died for every one who made it to the auction block, he said.

In the history of the world, no censor has ever been looked back on with respect.

Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity...Peace is their ruin,...by war they are enriched...Peace is their war, peace is their poverty.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.

You can't have occupation and human rights.

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice. Yet even Orwell did not dare to have it said that Big Brother's birth was attended by miraculous signs and portents - such as birds hailing the glorious event by singing in human words.

In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.

The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is "systematic." The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong.

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.

There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.

Jefferson writes dismissively of slaves that "their griefs are transient." American white supremacists to this day maintain that blacks are "mud people" because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—they are not capable of summoning "blood in the face," as the

every time the secret police close in, our heroes are able to "disapparate"—a term that always makes me think of an attempt at English by George W. Bush.

In other words, a handful of religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its Western heartland.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform.