Quotes About Oppression

Pour un pauvre être écrasé par les différents despotismes qui, peu ou prou, pèsent sur toutes les jeunesses, le premier usage du libre arbitre, exercé même sur des riens, apportait à Tâme je ne sais quel épanouissement.

Les lois sont des toiles d'araignée à travers lesquelles passent les grosses mouches et où restent les petites

if a man such as Samuel could evolve from a common, working man into a wealthy landowner, there was hope for anyone, provided he was white, for Negroes didn't count, and Indians were dead men walking.

Unofficially—for not even white men would write such rules down—if Matthew wanted to take Rabbit by force, no one would challenge him. It was not even against the law in Georgia for a white man to ravish a slave woman. If the woman was a white man's own slave, it was his right. If he ravished another white man's slave, it was only a crime against property, such as hurting a horse or dog that belonged to another. Yet

all this time, I been asking myself, why couldn't them crackers just leave us colored folks alone? Let

And give up the white man's god—his ugly god, his lying god, his torturous god, his thieving god, his tricking god, and rebuke his missionaries who had one set of rules for white Christians and another for Christians among the people, and who, when asked, talked crossways, so that one word followed the next down a line leading to a place where buzzards roosted and called out beaked noise.

Knowledge without education is but armed injustice.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.

tr?im într-o ?ar? în care nu r?ul este umbra binelui, ci binele este umbra r?ului, o ?ar? în care, a?a cum spunea Ernest Bernea dup? ce a ie?it din lunga sa închisoare politic?, oamenii nu pot fi decît ori cîini b?tu?i, ori lichele.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper and render them more important.

A religion which requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation.

Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil's propagation.

To be black is to be a dissident.

Jew-hating was back-of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn't go away. There was nowhere for them to go. They where indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.

But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn't instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope," Kennedy famously said in a speech delivered in South Africa in 1966 to condemn apartheid as well as the discrimination in his own country. "Crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them? The issue is not what it counsels them to do for others whose need may be greater, but what religion offers to meet their own needs. The search for an answer to this question is perhaps the most important religious quest of modern life.

The third fact is that Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group. In 63 B.C. Palestine fell into the hands of the Romans. After this date the gruesome details of loss of status were etched, line by line, in the sensitive soul of Israel, dramatized ever by an increasing desecration of the Holy Land.

Armed resistance is apt to be a tragic last resort in the life of the disinherited. Armed resistance has an appeal because it provides a form of expression, of activity, that releases tension and frees the oppressed from a disintegrating sense of complete impotency and helplessness.

It is never to be forgotten that one of the ways by which men measure their own significance is to be found in the amount of power and energy other men must use in order to crush them or hold them back.

THE significance of the religion of Jesus to people who stand with their backs against the wall has always seemed to me to be crucial.

MANY and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.

There is one overmastering problem that the socially and politically disinherited always face: Under what terms is survival possible?

Jesus and the Disinherited represents nothing less than those conversations Black parents must have with their children in a world that denies the created sacredness of their Black humanity.