Quotes About Oppression

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police…No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast—Corporal Hitler.

Gandhi... ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.

In practice, as even the Russians have now learned, the only way of pillaging a defeated nation is to cart away any movables which are wanted, and to drive off a portion of its manhood as permanent or temporary slaves.

The wicked are not always clever, nor are dictators always right.

Now, at the price of their life-blood, the long oppression had been rolled away. Surely here at last was peace and safety. With one passionate spasm the French people cried, "Never again!" But the future was heavy with foreboding.

Oy, stil – tiranlar?n aleti!

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.

In the end this obsession for conformity leads to fascism.

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed -- and who try to make slaves of all of us -- and they have their music and we have ours.

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed. And who try to make slaves of all of us. And they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare. And without their music and ideological miscarriages to compare our songs of freedom to, we'd not have any opposite to compare music with --- and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never know its speed, its power....

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Those who have bound themselves are only too eager to see the chains on others.

People with power always take advantage of those without power.

Genocidal societies also show a marked tendency toward what psychologists call "just-world" thinking: Victims are believed to have brought their suffering upon themselves and, thus, to deserve what they get.3

si te estás aprovechando de una persona que está en inferioridad de condiciones, estás abusando.

Banyak orang yang berkaki telanjang, tetapi mereka bukan orang yang revolusioner. Banyak orang berpangkat tinggi memakai sarung, tapi mereka bekerja sepenuh hati untuk penjajah. Jadi yang menandakan seseorang itu revolusioner adalah perjuangan yang dilakukannya. Kita adalah sepasukan tentara saudara-saudara.

Telah terbukti dalam sejarah keagamaan dan politik, bahwa usaha untuk menindas seorang pemimpin, akan membuat namanya semakin hidup di hati rakyat.

Aku masih memimpin satu revolusi, sekalipun hanya revolusi dari "tuntutan yang semakin meningkat". Ini berarti hidup menurut hukum revolusi: hantam lawan-lawanmu. Membunuh atau dibunuh. Memenjarakan atau dipenjarakan.

Suatu kehidupan yang terbagi atas kelas-kelas, kasta-kasta, dan golongan yang-puny dan yang-tidak-punya akan menghasilkan perbudakan.

Sebenarnya, rakyat Indonesia pada dasarnya bangsa yang lemah, patuh dan pendiam. Tetapi orang Belanda sendiri pernah mengatakan, di dalam jiwa orang Indonesia terdapat semangat seekor harimau. Dan apabila kami diterkam, kami sanggup melakukan tindakan-tindakan besar.

Geboren in een gevangenis, met lasten op onze schouders en onze gedachten, zouden wij niet in staat zijn het einde van een dag te halen als de mogelijkheid er een einde aan te maken ons niet aanspoorde om de volgende dag opnieuw te beginnen... De ketens en de verstikkende lucht van deze wereld ontnemen ons alles, behalve de vrijheid onszelf te doden; en deze vrijheid blaast ons zo'n kracht en een hoogmoed in dat ze zegeviert over de gewichten die ons verpletteren.