Quotes About Oppression

Ntozake Shange tells us it's not so good to be born a girl . She does not object to being born a girl. She objects to what it means when you are born a girl. She objects to the way that girls are treated. She objects to the way that our dreams are stifled. She objects to the way that we are not taken seriously, we are there as some sort of plaything

These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong.

This rebel would but toss his head, and men,slaves,horses, towers...all the accursed levels above him...would come tumbling down. God always works in this way. Deep in the foundations of wrong he buries the small despised cry of justice.

Man is a brute,' he said, striking the pebbles with his stick. 'A great brute. Your lordship doesn't realise this. It seems everything's been easy for you, but you ask me! A brute, I tell you! If you're cruel to him, he respects and fears you. If you're kind to him, he plucks your eyes out.

cu cât st?pânul st? mai sus, cu atât mai mult se lungeÈ™te funia robiei noastre, s?rim atunci È™i zburd?m într-o b?t?tur? mai larg?, murim f?r? s?-i d?m de cap?t È™i asta numim libertate [...]

They were panting dwarfs, imps gasping for breath, and their beards dragged along the ground. Each carried a strange implement of torture. Some held bloody leather belts studded with iron, some clasp knives and ox goads, some thick, wide-headed nails. Three midgets whose behinds nearly scraped the ground carried a massive, unwieldy cross; and last of all came the vilest of the lot, a cross-eyed pygmy holding a crown of thorns.

I have instant compassion for men as equal human beings. Equally beaten down by the patriarchy and equally lost and wandering. At least women get to hug each other.

There was a good Constitution in America, and he had read it carefully. It gave liberty, but he recognized that it worked only for people in skins whose color ran from pink to tan. People with darker skins might as well have fur or feathers.

They hired her for $ 17.50 a term, $ 1.50 less than Mr. Byers because she was a woman.

Native-born Protestants loathed and oppressed Catholics and immigrants, and Catholics and immigrants scorned and murdered Negroes, as if each group fed off its hate, needing the nourishment provided by the bone marrow of someone weaker.

Los protestantes nativos aborrecían y oprimían a católicos e inmigrantes, y los católicos e inmigrantes despreciaban y asesinaban a los negros, como si cada grupo viviera de su odio y necesitara el alimento que proporcionaba el tuétano de alguien más débil.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

power that isn't really justified by the will of the governed should be dismantled.

A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.

An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: "You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.

One should attend carefully to the fear and desperation of the powerful. They understand very well the potential reach of the ultimate weapon, and only hope that those who seek a more free and just world will not gain the same understanding and put it effectively to use.

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.

These facts have been completely removed from history. One has to practically scream them from the rooftops.

Settler colonialism, which is what this is, is by far the worst kind of imperialism, because it gets rid of the native population. Other kinds of imperialism exploit them, but settler colonialism eliminates them, "exterminates" them, to use the words of the Founding Fathers.

In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it's doing. There is only one way to do it—become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you've lost your capacity to understand what's happening.

at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit.

There may be no end to such discoveries, if civilization survives. A truly decent and honest person will always seek to discover forms of oppression, hierarchy, domination, and authority that infringe fundamental human rights. As some are overcome, others will be revealed that previously were not part of our conscious awareness. We thus come to a better understanding of who and what we are in our inner nature, and who and what we should be in our actual lives. This