Quotes About Oppression

If we know, and do nothing, we are worse that the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impasssable with our bodies the corridor the the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require my captivity song; They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.

You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?

It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree.

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish

The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way. When

If they come for you in the morning, they'll be coming for us that night.

The necessity, then, of those "lesser breeds without the law"—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again," leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.

The people who are running around throwing people in jail and ruining reputations and screaming about Communists wouldn't know one if he fell from the ceiling. And wouldn't care! What they are concerned about is propping up somehow the doctrine of white supremacy, so that they can seem to have given it up, but really still hold the power.

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which one *can* awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you. Part of the rage is this: it isn't only what is happening to you, but it's what's happening all around you all of the time, in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, the indifference and ignorance of the most white people in this country.

I know that when certain powerful and blatant enemies of black people are shoveled, at last, into the ground I may feel a certain pity that they spent their lives so badly, but I certainly do not mourn their passing, nor, when I hear that they are ailing, do I pray for their recovery.

small black boys and girls were now paying for this holocaust. They were attempting to go to school. They were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are white, and subjugation, if you are black. It was rather as though small Jewish boys and girls, in Hitler's Germany, insisted on getting a German education in order to overthrow the Third Reich.

the little girl who walked into the Little Rock School House and was spat on was much freer than the white child who sat there with a misconceived notion.

every major successful revolution ended by creating a state more powerful than the one it overthrew, a state that in turn was able to extract more resources from and exercise more control over the very populations it was designed to serve.

Never did I fight for the poor. I fought against the rich--which of course isn't at all the same thing. In any case, the fighting was the point. You don't fight to become free--to fight is to be free. A man with a gun and the will to use it can't be mastered, he can only be killed.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Without terror how can the few rule the many?

If you live in an oppressive society, you've got to be resilient. You can't let each little thing crush you. You have take every encounter and make yourself larger, rather than allow yourself to be diminished by it.

But might is right, according to the fashions of the 'arth; and what the strong chooses to do, the weak must call justice. - Natty Bumppo

Race and ethnicity constitute the ugly fog that hangs over everything in the criminal justice system—indeed everything in American history.

I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.