Quotes About Oppression

Jackal VI. Hundreds of People VII. Monseigneur in Town VIII. Monseigneur in the Country IX. The Gorgon's Head

Eres, precisamente, el hombre que necesitamos —le dijo Defarge al oído;— has hecho creer a esa gente que esta situación va a durar siempre. Así se harán más insolentes y llegarán más pronto a su fin.

Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

No faltaban señales de lo que hacia pobres a aquella gente desgraciada: los impuestos del Estado, los diezmos para la iglesia, los impuestos para el señor, los impuestos locales y generales, habían de ser pagados sin remedio, de acuerdo con un cartel fijado en el pueblo de modo visible, y lo que más raro parecía es con todos esos impuestos estuviera el pueblecillo todavía en pie.

Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along.

youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive,

go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

To name is to dominate, to categorize, to subjugate and, quite literally, to objectify

We cannot expect a miserable, oppressed populace to exercise much care for anything outside its immediate survival and security. While the poor are kept in a state of survival anxiety through sheer deprivation, the rich suffer poverty of another kind: lack of community, connection, meaning, and intimacy, which can cause severe psychological stress even in conditions of material plenty.

Without deep work on yourself, how will you avoid re-creating your own internalized oppression in all that you do?

How many revolutionaries have recreated, in their own organizations and countries, the very institutions of oppression they sought to overthrow?

The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.

Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.

When we see civilization elated with this declining and decrepit phase of its career, we are reminded of a faded belle who, boasting of her attractions in her fiftieth year, excites at once the remark that she was fairer at twenty-five. So it is with civilization, which, dreaming of perfection and progress, is constantly deteriorating, and which will find but too soon in its industrial achievements new sources of political oppression, crimes and commotions.

Life for the overwhelming majority of people who haven't been blessed to live in a free society has been, as Hobbes put it, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."8

Gentlemen, bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

...the devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot's dread of a newspaper that laughs.

There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.

Where gripping griefs the heart would wound, And doleful dumps the mind oppress, There music with her silver sound With speed is wont to send redress: Of troubled minds, in every sore, Sweet music hath a salve in store.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

O isolamento em companhia de uma pessoa era mais opressivo que a solidão completa.

Certos escritores se desculpam de não haverem forjado coisas excelentes por falta de liberdade -- talvez ingênuo recurso de justificar inépcia ou preguiça. Liberdade completa ninguém desfruta: começamos oprimidos pela sintaxe e acabamos às voltas com a Delegacia de Ordem Política e Social, mas, nos estreitos limites a que nos coagem a gramática e a lei, ainda nos podemos mexer

Sabia perfeitamente que era assim, acostumara-se a todas as violências, a todas as injustiças. E aos conhecidos que dormiam no tronco e aguentavam cipó de boi oferecia consolações: — "Tenha paciência. Apanhar do governo não é desfeita.

Deu um pontapé na cachorra, que se afastou humilhada e com sentimentos revolucionários.