Quotes About Oppression

On the one hand the Irish began to prove the truth of the assertion that successful revolutions are in fact no more than the kicking down of an already rotted door.

In all my life I have never experienced such orgies of murder, arson and looting as I have witnessed during the past 16 days with the RIC Auxiliaries. It baffles description. And we are supposed to be officers and gentlemen.

I think the enemy is self-censorship. In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself.

I guarantee there is nothing more depressing than knowing morons have complete power over you.

I need not point out that this affair represents an appalling setback," he wrote on New Year's Eve 1952. He pointed out that, in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet orbit, the "perfection of totalitarian police state techniques is approaching '1984' efficiency to a degree where 'resistance' can probably exist only in the minds of the enslaved peoples.

Sometimes you have to laugh at the absurdity of this system, so as not to cry.

We live not only in a racialized society, but also in a class system, a patriarchal system, and one of straight supremacy, able-bodied supremacy, and Christian hegemony. These

Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.

The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal. They reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a rage utterly beyond control. Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.

The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: "The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.

With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

aimed at all of Western Europe except Jews, who

The state had passed the world's first eugenic sterilization law, targeting "idiots, imbeciles, and confirmed criminals," as the statute dictated. The Klan was now pushing for a more severe measure, singling out paupers, alcoholics, thieves, prostitutes, and those with epilepsy to be sterilized against their will.

The 6,000 or so Black residents were forced into tenements and shacks in Baptisttown, a shank of the city without electricity or indoor plumbing. They were constantly harassed. Memories of a 1903 slaughter—twelve Blacks murdered and four saloons burned to the ground by a white mob—still haunted.

BLACK MAN DON'T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X's later observation that the Klan had 'changed its bedsheets for a policeman's uniform

Martin Luther King, Jr., famously remarked that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." Learning

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. —BISHOP DESMOND TUTU, South African cleric and activist

I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose – you didn't know that, did you, Poke?…He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it's a good name and it means 'spirit,' and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong." She laughs, rough as a cough. "The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile.

Some scholars claim that over 250,000 people were put to death for the crime of Witchcraft during the "burning times" in Europe, while others say the number reached as high as nine million.

brings to mind the tribulations of those groups—blacks in the 19th century, women in the 20th, gays in the 21st—who have learned through struggle that freedom is not given, only claimed.

Beat and cuff the slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog," but "give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master."1