Quotes About Oppression

Perhaps you imagine the Negroes to be a mild tempered, tractable kind of people. Some of them are indeed so. But the majority are of a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel in the highest degree."23

A Einstein le ponía los pelos de punta cualquier forma de tiranía sobre las mentes libres, desde el nazismo hasta el estalinismo, pasando por el macartismo.

Never an insider, Murray used her outsider status to make herself a thorn in the side of segregation and political oppression.

Looking back at a century that will be remembered for its willingness to break classical bonds, and looking ahead to an era that seeks to nurture the creativity needed for scientific innovation, one person stands out as a paramount icon of our age: the kindly refugee from oppression whose wild halo of hair, twinkling eyes, engaging humanity, and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius.

That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.

Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we're feeling liberation we know that there's somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.

They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign.

I don't give a fuck what you're trying to do or what you want. I'd send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick.

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.

But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage. Those two cops felt fully authorized to stop us with no reason and no warrant. They felt that they could question us and search us and cart us off to jail if there was the slightest flaw in how we explained our business. Even

But Socco, Mustafa Ali said. If there ain't no black people really and they ain't no white people then how come you still usin' them words? Because them words still usin' me, brother Ali. They usin' me like a mothahfuckah.

You know, the undersized genius had said, ain't no way in the world that black folks could'a done enough bad to call all them centuries'a pain down on our heads.

I wanted to say to the little white man, "Listen, brother, we're not enemies. I just want to go up in an elevator like anybody else. You don't need to worry about me. It's the men that own this building that are making you poor and uneducated and angry.

The question is,' John added, 'if a person inside a culture has no knowledge of his place in the unfolding of that culture, or in the history of any other people, and if no one else among either the oppressors or the oppressed has that knowledge, can that person be said to be alive? Indeed on what plane could he possibly exist except as chattel where he is a slave or not?

Somewhere along the way I had developed the feeling that I wasn't going to outlive the adventure I was having. There was no way out but to run, and I couldn't run, so I decided to milk all those white people for all the money they'd let go of. Money bought everything. Money paid the rent and fed the kitty. Money was why Coretta was dead and why DeWitt Albright was going to kill me. I got the idea, somehow, that if I got enough money then maybe I could buy my own life back.

A job in a factory is an awful lot like working on a plantation in the South. The bosses see all the workers like they're children, and everyone knows how lazy children are.

Black men of our day were never told , the skies the limit. Our limits were more like the inner lid of a coffin.

When a woman forgets that she's supposed to be pretty and on display she looks like that murdered girl did, just somebody who's tired and needs to rest.

Most Americans wouldn't understand why two well-dressed men would have to explain why they were standing on a public street. But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage.

The American imperialists go so far as to take the folk music, jazz, and soul music of oppressed black people and transform this into American propaganda over the Voice of America beamed at Africa.

Actually, if "underdevelopment" were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the United States, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.

All white people are enemies until proved otherwise, and this applies to black intellectuals, all of us are enemies to the people until we prove otherwise.

White slave masters used to conduct a discussion. They said, look, we have some blacks, what to do with them? Is it better to let him grow old and work for us for an extended period of time, or should we let him work for a specified period of time, work him so hard and let him die, and buy a fresh slave? And the consensus of opinion was this; take a prime African black, work him to death in five years, and you make a profit. So the system aimed at killing us out!

The essence of white power is that it is exercised over black peoples - whether or not [black peoples] are minority of majority, whether it was a country belonging originally to whites or to blacks. It is exercised in such a way that black people have no share in that power and are, therefore, denied any say in their own destinies.