Quotes About Oppression

I was the Count of Monte Cristo, who would one day return from the terrible prison island to take revenge on all those who had sent him there. I was Napoléon, banished to die a lonely death on Saint Helena. I was Harry, locked up under the Dursleys' staircase.

A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one's soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print and dead man's sentiment. Would it not be better, finer, braver to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free untrammelled illiterate Superman?

Their prince had weightier matters on his mind just now than the troubles of a farmer whose neighbour had stolen his pig, a cobbler who had bought poor quality leather from a dealer, or a seamstress whose husband beat her every night when he came home drunk.

Of course no on planned to give them pleasure — the poor were put into the world to work, not to have a nice time or look at pretty pictures. That kind of thing was for the rich.

She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn't afford to anger them. She wouldn't do it.

No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --

You're also not white. You ever hear those heritage-not-hate types, that myth that the Irish were the first slaves in America? They're an interesting bunch. They're so close, you know, so close to understanding that whiteness is a thing that other people choose for you. People are white if whiteness is endowed upon them by the wider whiteness. It starts before birth and carries on after you're dead. And what whiteness gives, it can take away.

I'd rather be a criminal underground than a secret police.

If a paycheck could change your life, do you think they'd let you have one?

You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.

But the winds will still blow when I am no longer here. The storms will still rage, and the forces of Empire and oppression, be they Roman or otherwise, will still be waiting at the corners of the ocean. The fight goes on for the Heroes of the Future.

The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.

What kind of a world was it where in order to be on top you had to push others under — as if you were pushing heads down underwater — and hold them there until they drowned, and then you could be on top.

Irony is the glory of slaves.

The officer sat with his long, fine hands lying on the table, perfectly still, and all his blood seemed to be corroding. - The Prussian Officer

though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labor-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. i'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. but since i can't, an' nobody can, i'd better hold my peace, an' try an' life my own life: if i've got one to live, which i rather doubt.

Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she was being crushed to death by weird lies and by the amazing cruelty of idiocy.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

You, and rule!" she said. "You don't rule, don't flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation.

Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today.

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.

Everything is sold. You don't give one heart-beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?

Ah, God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow-men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.

Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and[59] I seek to enact this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying.