Quotes About Oppression

You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'

Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour.

Neutrality is for referees in a football game. You have to take a stand. The really, really good journalists always take a stand with those who have no power, with those who have no rights, and with those who have no voice.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.

Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.

You can't understand what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, you can't understand what happened to Eric Garner in New York City, without understanding this narrative of racial difference that was created during the slave years.

Bullies now aren't just jocks. They're rich kids in the nice cars with the fancy clothes.

In fact, despite the fact that he's somehow managed to brand himself as a moderate choice, Michael Bloomberg's record is actually that of an authoritarian nightmare.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

I should like to underline: no people, no country, in which a Communist dictatorship has been established, ever found its way out of it.

There's no doubt that the Chinese government is waging a full-fledged crackdown on Demosisto.

I hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.

Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.

As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless.

If we confine ourselves to waiting, we will not get the 'great day' at all, but rather the tanks in the small hours of the morning.

As I stood in the room looking at it for the last time, I felt again the cold metal of the handcuffs on my wrists and remembered the physical suffering and mental anguish I had endured while fighting with all the willpower and intellect God had given me for that rare and elusive thing in a Communist country called justice.

While I listened to the words of homage to Mao, I remembered Mao's awesome power, like a blanket over China threatening to smother whomever he chose.

She took me to a small office and told me that she had been trying to arrange for me to be examined by a gynecologist in a city hospital. But at that time the hospitals in Shanghai, controlled by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries, were refusing to give medical treatment to "class enemies.

Communism was a godless ideology: an idealized system of human government that could only be maintained by operating a ruthless police state

Mill sets out several related arguments for protecting freedom of speech, not just from oppressive government intervention, but also from social pressures. Underlying them all are the assumptions that (a) truth is valuable, and (b) no matter how certain someone is that they know the truth, their judgement is still fallible: they might still be wrong.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things is the enemy, patriarchy in medicine, patriarchy in schools, or in literature.

Because I think we forget something about slavery: There was an enormous amount of sexual license. People talk about, well, the money; the economy; the this…But you realize if you own a human being, you really own them. You can get them—boys, girls—to do anything you say, on pain of death. That's what it means to own a human being.

and sometimes on rainy nights you see an old white woman who maybe you'd really care about except that you're a young Black woman whose job it is to kill maim or seriously make her question the validity of her existence