Quotes About Oppression

They did laugh; they did fall in love. And while they were under incredibly oppressive conditions, they constantly were trying to steal pleasures. When you go back to the slave narratives, and you read books like the 'Bullwhip Days' or 'Incidents in the Life of the Slave Girl,' they will share what life was like, and it's a 365-degree view.

Power is every stealing from the many to the few.

It's so easy to steal from the bottom 99 percent, but try stealing from the top one percent, and they put you under the jail.

It's hard enough for disabled people to get acting jobs without able-bodied people taking them. As an actor, I know that I'm not going to be stealing any able-bodied roles from any able-bodied people.

The price of toppling Gadhafi will be steep. But Libyans will topple him, and in doing so, they will bring down with him the castles of fear our dictators thought they had fortified.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

All art stems from a place of alienation. Intimate and alone. Most people are oppressed by the opinion of others, but I was not that way. I was afraid of the repercussions of not doing what I was told to do, what I was called to do by a creator.

Getting rid of the dictator is only a first step in establishing a free society. The dictatorship must also be disassembled.

Losing their reproductive rights is the first step to how women live in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.

I don't think people understand the model-minority stereotype is negative. You are boxed in. You have to untangle that to find your own path.

I think there's definitely a stereotype of white privilege, and that stereotype gets expanded to mean rich, not oppressed, not suffering, et cetera. And yes, it's a misperception.

Why is it kind of acceptable to say that the Germans are better at penalties, but not that blacks are better at boxing? Is it simply that you're allowed to stereotype a group perceived as oppressive, but not one perceived as oppressed - which is why it's fine for women columnists constantly to rail against men, but never the other way round?

Orwell depicts the proletarians as essentially uncontrollable. The state does not try to control them as much as it simply distracts them.

One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Noise, crowding, pollution, and the sheer rush of our complex, modern society are rapidly becoming as oppressive to many individuals as the worst kind of political dictatorship.

If you mean to protest slavery, you might put in a word for your own. There are no worse slaves in this barony than those poor lads you bring in from the hiring fair and keep half starved on potatoes an honest man would not throw to sows.

A system more ingeniously contrived, first for the debasement, and then for the continuance in that debasement, of an entire people cannot easily be imagined.

He was fighting not for them but for a word. Ireland. Not moorlands and rivers, not people, but a word. The word was a bell, vibrant and thrilling, ringing through her memories of conversations. Ireland. Ireland was oppressed. Ireland must fight for its freedom. Ireland must take its place among the nations of the world.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Conservatism does not defend some established order of things: It accuses; it rants; it points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions.

Anti-populism is always about the powerful lording it over the weak; the credentialed and the high-born reminding the world that the definitions of goodness and justice and truth are whatever they determine.

Cruelty is a tyrant that's always attended with fear.

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breastThe little tyrant of his fields withstood;Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

Once victim, always victim - that's the law!

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.