Quotes About Oppression

To me, entertainment is really the new plantation. It's the new sugar, the new cotton, that black people work for somebody else to be richer than them.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago!.

A [typical] worker is a part-time slave.

It used to be that nobody would really argue with a woman, because what she thought (unless it was by way of providing helpful comments about one's own work) just didn't matter.

If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.

Many people who are drawn to work about racism and transphobia may be new to thinking deeply about colonialism and indigenous resistance in their North America.

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.

Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers.

We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.

All that waiting around for a glimmer of stage time, just getting angry every week... It was just an oppressive, horrible, horrible place to be. I went to work feeling nauseous.

In the bad old days, men kept women from choosing to work. In the bad new days, women keep women from choosing to stay home.

And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

Compromise is not such ignoble and deplorable a thing as we generally think. It is rather an indispensable factor in the political strategy. Any nation that rises against the oppressors is bound to fail in the beginning and to gain partial reforms during the medieval period of its struggle through compromises.

You get racism crossing the street; it's in the very fabric of American society.

What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.

The wretch who lives without freedom feels like dressing in the mud from the streets Those who have you, o Liberty, do not know. you. Those who do not have you should not speak of you, but win you.

Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life.

I grew up under the British system, which I think is horrific for children - very, very strict - a system that did not recognize children as being individuals. You were small animals earning the right to be human.

Power, privilege, and violence are not, and never were, strictly Southern issues in America.

A lot of the work I've been doing on camera has been me speaking on trans issues and illuminating things in a comedic way. That isn't the focus of my personal art, I guess, but it's a privilege for any artist to get to make stuff that isn't just about their oppression or strife or struggle.

To say that I could manipulate one of the men who has shown the most courage before the Cuban government, who gets beaten every day, who did a hunger strike that freed political prisoners... I think that's absurd.

Churchill the right-winger has been elevated to a status where you can't criticise him. People from the time remember him as an imperialist, a hard-right politician, very instrumental in the oppression of Ireland and the attempt to defeat the general strike.

Many of us were raised with the 'be a lady' thing, and all those kind of things that can be used against you and strip you out of opportunity and power.