Quotes About Oppression

You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.

Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous.

Another woman, "whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,"2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.

Vast and implacable, like a kraken of the deep undisturbed by storms raging across the ocean surface, the apparatus of empire still coiled its prodigious tentacles, ready to flex and squeeze its victims tightly, as it had ever done.

Now, speaking as men no longer dared to speak, his daughter had fearlessly arraigned the Triumvirs themselves. 'Why should we women pay taxes,' Hortensia had demanded, 'when we have no part in the honours, the commands, the rule of the state?'23 To this question, the Triumvirs had responded by having the women driven from the Forum; but such was their embarrassment that they did eventually, with much bad grace, agree to a tax cut.

Remember the war against Franco?That's the kind where each of us belongs.Though he may have won all the battles,We had all the good songs.

But how many chose to ignore the direct attack they laid on what is fed to all of us as 'life,' with its well-defined roads to factory and pool-hall, to work and pleasure, both organized, both shells, both a continuation of existence by forced means, in the shadow of life?

The English upper classes were regular churchgoers but they allowed children to work for sixteen hours a day in mines and factories. They insisted their wives and daughters were too delicate for work, yet their twelve-year-old maids worked eighty and more hours each week. It was a world that started a revolution

Even as the armies of slaves were underfed and dying from hunger, some were forced to wear bizarre tin-plate masks, in hundred-degree heat, to keep them from gaining the slightest nourishment from chewing the cane. The

1780, as Thomas-Alexandre turned eighteen, the king issued a new law prohibiting people of color from using the titles Sieur or Dame ("Sir" or "Madame"). Saint-Georges remained a chevalier—and Thomas-Alexandre was a count—but neither could use "Sir" before his name without risking arrest.

energized and emboldened delegates of the Third Estate, the "99 percent"—in reality, closer to 96 percent—of the French population who paid the bulk of the taxes

French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects.

History shows that when you attack the majority it usually doesn't work out well for the minority.

The growth of literacy was sparking an awakening – welcome to some, dreadful to others – across the slave-empire of Jamaica. Reading seemed to ignite a hidden store of fuel within an enslaved person.

For enslaved people who had spent their entire lives under the shadow of the whip, without any military training of experience with guns, to one day pick up a firearm or a machete or even a rock and oppose a superior force must have taken an extraordinary level of nerve. The thirst for liberty was powerful enough to overcome even the fear of probable death.

The slaves themselves were powerless to create any written record of what they witnessed, or to publicize it in any way beyond the discreet oral circles of plantation life. What can be known of Sharpe's method and motives must be seen through the lens of the Jamaican prosecutorial narrative, which sought to understand him only to the point of gathering sufficient evidence to justify his hanging.

If Samuel Sharpe had been trying to seize the attention of the mother country – just as Nat Turner had given the American South a brief window through which to reconsider slavery – he succeeded far beyond what he might have hoped. Never before had enslaved people spoken so loudly in Britain.

Ideal theory provides evaluative standards for judging when a social order is seriously unjust and an objective to strive for in our re sis tance to oppression. Injustices are conceptualized as deviations from the ideal princi ples of justice, in much the same way that fallacious reasoning is conceived as a deviation from the rules of logical inference. An injustice is a failure on the part of individuals, institutions, or social arrangements to satisfy what the princi ples of justice demand.

We had to be seen because we couldn't be heard.

Let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. It may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.

Silence equals death.

There were many bloody period in human history, many of them occurring right here in North America.

Them little ol' priests, the things they did? Pooh! No wonder us Indian folk are all the shits.

As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.