Quotes About Oppression

Read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard commencement address on that one.)

May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, misery, toil, and moil.

Monotheism by whatever name has been the rationale for war and genocide forever. And the Unchosen, the inferior Others, are always demonized as an excuse to oppress them.

Finding themselves denied access to their own building by the well-armed marshalls with their sandbag fortifications and machine guns, they realized that the feds intended to support Dick Wilson no matter what offenses he had committed, so long as he waged war on AIM; clearly, this Wilson was no different from other petty dictators around the world, propped up by weapons sent from the U.S. under the panoply of anti-Communism so long as they protected corporate interests.

They locked her in the cage when she started to bleed.

A true Christian militant attacks systems of oppression and fights for a better world even though that new world might negatively affect their own position of power.

If we have learned anything from the liberation movements, we should have learned how difficult it is to be aware of the ways in which we discriminate until they are forcefully pointed out to us. A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.

Marx portrays religion as a response to the oppression and heartlessness of the world; but an inadequate response because instead of challenging the oppression itself, it merely numbs the pain.

Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue...? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending the ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels and terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible?

but if we examine more deeply the basis on which our opposition to discrimination on grounds of race or sex ultimately rests, we will see that we would be on shaky ground if we were to demand equality for blacks, women, and other groups of oppressed humans while denying equal consideration to nonhumans.

When history looks back, do you want to be counted among the oppressors? Or among the liberators? You've got to make that choice.

They talk about this thing in the head; what do they call it? ["Intellect," whispered someone nearby.] That's it. What's that got to do with women's rights or Negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?3

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

By the time that the League of Nations turned Rwanda over to Belgium as a spoil of World War I, the terms Hutu and Tutsi had become clearly defined as opposing "ethnic" identities, and the Belgians made this polarization the cornerstone of their colonial policy.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?

Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph.

One of these days, Joe said wrathfully, people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return, and when that happens someone like myself who has gone through an ordeal and who genuinely needs hot coffee to pick him up and keep him functioning when he has to function will get the hot coffee whether he happens to have a postcred readily available or not.

When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back.

I believe he's got a lot of courage to write that book. If the Axis had lost the war, we'd be able to say and write anything we wanted, like we used to; we'd be one country and we'd have a fair legal system, the same one for all of us.

You know what I think? I think you've picked up the Nazi idea that Jews can't create. That they can only imitate and sell. Middlemen.' He fixed his merciless scrutiny on Frink. 'Maybe so,' Frink said.

And after all, they had been successful with the Jews and Gypsies and Bible Students.

When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back. Why not? Why shouldn't it?

Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke. No wonder it's banned within Reich territory;

Things happen fast, during the time of transition in a totalitarian society.