Quotes About Oppression

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

I think of Harriet Muse as one fierce lady. She couldn't read. She had no education. She did labor her whole life. And she stood up to Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey at a time where she was told where to work, where to sit, and she demanded that they pay attention to her.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

The machine of repression can only be started, it can't be stopped - even by Putin.

The major newspapers simply stopped writing about me, and my voice could no longer be heard on radio or television.

I've participated in many demonstrations since I was a child. When I was at medical college, I was fighting King Farouk, then British colonization, against Nasser, against Sadat who pushed me into prison, Mubarak who pushed me into exile. I never stopped.

Men and women wonder if merely walking or driving justifies being followed, stopped, or questioned. This practice and the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color must come to an end.

Even before 'Pose,' I was involved in activism and advocating for my community in various ways. I didn't see that stopping with my entry into this industry, but people are going to be afraid of what you're going to say. I'm going to bump heads with people that benefit from the oppression that they put trans people through.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.

On Apple's special store for the Chinese market, apps related to the Dalai Lama are censored, as is one containing information about the exiled Uighur dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer. Apple similarly censors apps for iPads sold in China.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

That is just the reality of being a marginalized person in this country: you have to deal with the psychological impact of your oppressor - whether that's being a woman dealing with men or gay people dealing with straight people or trans people dealing with everybody else.

I will not remain silent, resigned to watch as my fellow prisoners collapse under the strain of slavery-like conditions.

These poor wretches were stolen from their homes, carried to a strange country, and sold to servitude, from which they sought to escape on the first occasion which offered.

My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.

In South Africa, I feel I am a stranger, at best an animal.

His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings.

When a dictatorship imprisons someone or makes them disappear, it's actually a very strategic move. We forget that. It's not as senseless as it seems. It's a way to silence someone, but also it's a way to silence their family as well, out of fear, and society by extension.

The dictator has to keep the economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it.

Willful submission to a sinful man has become an act of vulnerability for a woman.

Freedom, what crimes are committed in thy name.

the Irish... qualities are hidden, besmirched, by that what has been imposed upon us, just as the fine, splendid surface of Ireland is besmirched by our towns and villages

Your Government would soon find itself regarded as a tyrannical junta which having got into office by violence was seeking to maintain itself by a denial of constitutional rights.