Quotes About Oppression

From the viewpoint of this level, the world looks hazardous, full of traps and threats. Fear is the favored official tool for control by oppressive totalitarian agencies and regimes, and insecurity is the stock-in-trade of major manipulators of the marketplace. The media and advertising play to Fear to increase market share.

Whiteness is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive.

States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don't want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don't want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

The approach of Christmas signifies three things: bad movies, unforgivable television, and even worse theater. I'm talking bone-crushing theater, the type our ancient ancestors used to oppress their enemies before the invention of the stretching rack.

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.' 

Las cucarachas sobreviven, los héroes son aplastados.

When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1879

Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.

His "wickedly selfish" Americans loved to celebrate their "own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.

In August, Douglass righteously claimed that "everyone knows that this is the slaveholders' rebellion and nothing else." The war, he said, was the work of a "privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fasten upon the Negro's flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes.

Well the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present."39

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855

Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition

Education and Slavery were incompatible with each other. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1845

We have but one weapon unimpaired and that is the weapon of speech, and not to use it . . . is treason to the oppressed.

In America Bibles and slaveholders go hand in hand. The church and the slave prison stand together, and while you hear the chanting of psalms in one, you hear the clanking of chains in the other. The man who wields the cowhide during the week, fills the pulpit on Sunday. . . . The man who whipped me in the week used to . . . show me the way of life on the Sabbath

It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before.

The blacks or coloured people are treated more cruel by the white Christans of America than devils themselves ever treated a set of men, women, and children on this earth. - David Walker 1829

He knew that now, and a cold corner of his brain wondered why so few repressive regimes seemed to realize that they themselves created the rebels who must ultimately destroy them.

Doing time in a Disposable Body.

When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world

If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, "Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go!"—do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've