Quotes About Oppression

But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse

The Negro farmer started behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, — not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor

obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems.

A nation's religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.

Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve someone's slavery. They do not want equality because the thrill of their happiness comes from having things that others have not.

Racism is not just hatred. Racism is a system. A system that dehumanizes humans in order to keep them down and, most often, to make money off of them. -- Adam Gidwitz, The Inheritance

You can be two things if you're a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place - even if it kills you.

why would white dudes want to change things when they held all the cards?

The biggest bigots were the ones who felt most directly threatened by the underclass. The ones who felt the most moved in on.

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

Mal sirven a la libertad aquellos cuya buena intención se ve frustrada por un fracaso o dos o cualquier número de fracasos, o por la indiferencia despreocupada o la ingratitud de la gente, o por el triste espectáculo de las garras del poder, o si aparecen por el medio soldados y cañones o el código penal.

Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air, the air of slaves, Like lightning Europe le'pt forth, Sombre, superb and terrible.

If America is not for freedom I do not see what it is for.

Jeff Whitman [Walt's brother, who was with him in New Orleans] complained to his mother about all the folks who eagerly hurried to church on Sundays, dip their fingers in the holy water, and then go home and whip their slaves.

Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "emergency situation" in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.

A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.

oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.

Each period is dominated by a mood, with the result that most men fail to see the tyrant who rules over them.

Orwell conjures up an Orwellian world

Eripuit cœlo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis, he snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.