Quotes About Oppression

Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

As long as it is supported by Democratic politicians and by liberal Hollywood players, censorship is a useful tool to stifle dissent.

I think it's useful to recall that a lot of these statutes like 'disrupting the classroom' or 'disturbing the peace' have long been historically used to oppress and criminalize black people.

It was of limited usefulness to head great rallies. The government did not listen, and, soon enough, the tear gas and the muzzles of the guns were turned against the people. The justice of our cries went unrecognized.

How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.

The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.

Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

The problem is that the Iraqi people are facing atrocities from both sides - Zarqawi and also the American troops at times. The Zarqawi groups uses car bombs, the Americans use other bombs. You also know what they do in the prisons.

There's nothing that's more unfair or unjust than people using their power to try to make other people feel small, to tell them who they are or what they are capable of, to say their identity doesn't belong.

Black men constantly receive the message that they can't make it in life through using legitimate means, and the only way they gain society's respect is through the street game.

Fraud, robbery, and murder have characterized the English usurpation of the government of our country. Why, for the last fifty years we have been robbed in the matter of taxes of hundreds of millions.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.

The Cuban people still live in constant fear of a brutal totalitarian regime that has demonstrated time and again its utter disregard for basic human dignity. The fight for a free Cuba has gone on for far too long.

If, by some miracle, women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition, there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved.

In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.

When I explain to people what was the situation in North Korea, they think, how can such a country exist? They know North Korea is bad in some vague way, not clearly. But when we explain it, they then wonder how can a whole country be modern-day slaves?

People are dying in vain because this country isn't holding their end of the bargain up as far as, you know, giving freedom and justice and liberty to everybody.

Poverty was my mother's midwife. She had her children in poverty. But she also found a road to bring us a sense of purpose, and she taught us how to be valiant in the face of oppression.

We know that dismantling old oppressive regimes is a great deal faster and easier than building new flourishing democracies. Chinggis Khaan once said, 'It was easier to conquer the world on horseback than to dismount and govern.' True validation of democracy lies less in what we tear down, and more in what we build.

Anti-Asian racism is very real, and it will not be solved with an opulent rom-com or Marvel superhero, but with you - the bystanders - acknowledging the validity of our pain.

From racial profiling and being pulled over just for 'driving while black' to this new phenomenon of killing unarmed people out of some preconceived idea of fear, our lives and our children's lives are not being valued.

My mother was very, very beautiful, and I saw that the beautiful women around me were often constrained not only by their beauty but by the way that being an object of male desire frequently caused violence in their lives. And it caused them to be constrained in these terribly sad ways - their brilliance was not valued.

Some people, with a certain nostalgia, the worshippers and admirers of the colonial system, cherish and nurse its structures instead of smashing them. This is typical of a mentality in bondage to decadent values, negative values - counter-revolutionary values.