Quotes About Oppression

the story of gendered time is not one of beastly oppressive men and poor downtrodden women. It's a story of cultural scripts which we all follow without thinking.

We creep closer to equality, before something drags us back. Misogyny mutates. Sexism and feminism are like bacteria and antibiotics; the latter forces the former to evolve. As soon as one argument against women's rights becomes useless, another takes its place.

You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and when you arrive they put you in prison and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered they send you back.

I said that as far as I could gather it was a tale about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her.

The only thing that disturbs us here in the village is the foreign soldiers. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, patrolling. They fight us and they try to tell us, in our own language, that they're freeing us.

The mandate to practice social justice is unsettling because taking on the struggles of the poor invariably means challenging the wealthy and those who serve their interests.

She pointed out that to claim to be apolitical or neutral in the face of such injustices would be, in actuality, to uphold the status quo - a very political position to take and on the side of the oppressors.

Amnesty's investigation into the judicial processes of the hundred or so governments that impose the death sentence (the United States and Turkey are the only NATO countries that continue to execute) has revealed that without exception, the penalty of death is disproportionately meted out to "the poor, the powerless, the marginalized or those whom repressive governments deem it expedient to eliminate. No government gets it right.

Thoreau: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

These arguments were, in his eyes, 'reactionary'; they subverted his insistence on relentless class war leading to the violent overthrow of the tsarist order.

That society is badly arranged which forces nearly all women to be servants. Marie, who is as good as I am, will have spent her life in cleaning, in stooping amid dust and hot fumes, over head and ears in the great artificial darkness of the house. I used to find it all natural. Now I think it is all anti-natural.

The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority.

Not surprisingly, the all-powerful evocation of terrorism is reserved only for those acts that threaten the government-sponsored status quo, but not that perpetrated by the state or corporations against the population. So, for example, the ugly history of white people lynching, bombing, and killing Blacks in the United States is not understood, taught, or remembered as a part of the homeland's history of terrorism.

We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.

The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.

The moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder.

It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

So we defend ourselves and our henroosts, and maintain slavery.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison . . . the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

we have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it, chattel slavery. There is a deeper and a more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him with the name of freedom

I will have no pardon from any proud prelate for any ill I do to the evil brood of priests. Come soon, come late, I knew that ere long I should do some deed against the doers of evil who sit in strong castles or loll in soft abbeys and oppress and wrong poor or weaker folk. It is done at last, and I am content