Quotes About Oppression

That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion . This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and wor.

That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.

Meanwhile, in the garden they dug large pits and in each pit they buried ten men alive. On both sides of the gate they constructed huge pyramids made up of the Derevlian commoners' severed heads.

White women who were raped were expected to die as a result of their abuse. Their degradation was expected to be totalizing, making postrape life unimaginable. But black female slaves survived their rapes and continued the work they were forced to do—a circumstance used as evidence that they were not properly feminine.11 According

History, in the hands of those who have the most to gain from change, is a formidable weapon. That's why colonizers and imperialists always burned and destroyed the historical accounts of those they conquered. They revise history to parrot one message over and over again, "the way things are now is the way they've always been". The meaning is clear and demoralizing: Don't even think about fighting for change.

very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.

The powers who controlled the United States didn't want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up.

it was important for the people to understand that all around them lay human slavery, although most recently it had been called by other names. Everyone was or had been a slave to some other person or to something that was controlled by another. Most people were not free.

The white man hated to hear anything about spirits because spirits were already dead and could not be tortured and butchered or shot, the only way the white man knew how to deal with the world. Spirits were immune to the white man's threat...s and to his bribes of money and food. The white man only knew one way to control himself or others and that was with brute force.

Women are slaves to their beauty.

A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless.

bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny.

In fact, you cannot condemn torture on political grounds, because in most cases it is perfectly efficient and the torturers get what they want. You can condemn it only on moral grounds and then, necessarily, everywhere in the same way, in Batista's Cuba or in Castro's Cuba, in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, (Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,) Black body swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

The only people who object to escapism are jailers.

It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul.

If the Eloquent peasant finally obtained justice, as seems indicated at the point where the document breaks off, it was only, we should remember, after he had been teased and tormented, even flogged, by his betters merely to increase their amusement over his delightful impudence in standing up for his rights and answering back.

But instead of freeing labor, the royal mega-machine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it.

The megamachine is an elephant that fears even the smallest mouse.

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

The great secret of centralized power was secrecy itself. That holds of all totalitarian states down to our own day.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking.

My concern is: How on earth is anything more urgent than the lives of people in North Korean concentration camps?