Quotes About Oppression

Para ello [Lenin] lo sacrificó todo; para alcanzar el poder inmoló, mató lo más sagrado que Rusia poseía: la libertad. Pero ¿qué experiencia podía tener la libertad, una criatura de sólo ocho meses, nacida en un país de esclavitud milenaria?

Until the neglected and the rejected are accepted and respected, there's gonna be no damn peace . . . nowhere! Only a tree will stand still while it's being chopped down.

So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.

The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.

Fex urbis, lex orbis (The dregs of the city, the law of the earth), from Les Miserables, attributed to St. Jerome

You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up.

A chair is not a caste.

A wretched woman is more unfortunate than a wretched man, because she is an instrument of pleasure.

This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!

the phantom of social justice tormented him.

Sahte siyasi gerçekler ne kadar iÄŸrenç! Bir düÅŸünce, bir hayal, bir kavramdan dolay? giyotin ad? verilen o korkunç gerçeklik!

In that pallid and sullen shadow in which he crawled, whenever he turned his head and endeavoured to raise his eyes, he saw, with mingled rage and terror, forming, massing, and mounting up out of sight above him with horrid escarpments, a kind of frightful accumulation of things, of laws, of prejudices, of men, and of acts, the outlines of which escaped him, the weight of which appalled him, and which was no other than that prodigious pyramid that we call civilization.

Whoever you may be, if your name is Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin. The little fellow will grow up.

There is a crime commited by the society against the individual,a crime that is commited afresh each day

La popularité ne va jamais sans la défaveur. L'amour des esclaves est toujours doublé de la haine des maîtres.

Which of the two was the victim of the other?

The faults of women, of children, of the feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands, the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise.

As long as there are misérables there will be a cloud on the horizon that can become a phantom and a phantom that can become Marat.

Des marchands de sang humain criaient a tue-tête : Qui veut des places ?. Une rage m'a pris contre ce peuple. J'ai eu envie de leur crier : Qui veut la mienne ?

three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved;

Injustice had made her sulle, and misery had made her ugly.