Quotes About Oppression

If we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.

The ideal citizen of a tyrannical state is the man or woman who bows in silent obedience in exchange for the status of a well-cared-for herd animal. Thinking people become the tyrant's greatest enemies.

These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what's of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will.

The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.

Fascism is the punishment inflicted on the proletariat for not having continued the revolution begun in Russia.

Hundreds of thousands of working women who labour with their brains are just as much exploited by the action of capitalists and middle-men as the millions of women who work with their hands, because the whole capitalist class hangs together, and defends its interests.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

When they want a working man for anything excepting work they want him for conspiracy.

We are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and if no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.

And the churches are full of those who fear God's wrath. And those who plead for mercy which is the opposite of wrath. No, no, I do not feel sorry for those who die of hunger. What I feel is rage. And I see no harm in stealing to eat.

The primary function for writing as a means of communication is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

If we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot.

The Europeans fight to exterminate us and call it civilizing us.

Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about.

a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

History's authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage.