Quotes About Oppression

Thurman proclaims that Jesus, a poor non-Roman Jew, knew intimately what it meant to be "a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group." Therefore, Thurman declares, "the teachings and the life of Jesus" have something special "to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.

Even as Thurman recognizes that Christianity has been used throughout history as "an instrument of oppression," he makes clear "that Christianity as it was born in the mind of [Jesus] appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed.

Thurman goes on to provide a theological testimony of faith concerning the one who "announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over [those with their backs against the wall].

FEAR is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited.

The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.

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 English imposed their language on Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and they weren't terribly nice about it.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

There are those who say to you -- we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively - I am one with the people.

It was almost like being on an urban plantation, a kind of modern-day sharecropping. You worked hard, brought in your crop, and you were always in debt to the landholder.

Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.

It seemed as though most of the cats that we'd come up with just hadn't made it," he says. "Almost everybody was dead or in jail." Many young Black men in our generation can say the same thing. Drugs, oppression, and despair take their toll. Survival is not a simple matter or something to be taken for granted.

On the whole, however, it is not our own liability to death which oppresses us. The fear of it to a brave man, not to speak of a man of faith, can be overcome. It is the fear of it for others whom we love, which is its sting.

It is not always the going from bad to worse that causes a revolution. It happens more often that a people who have borne without complaint, and apparently without feeling, most oppressive laws, throw them off violently as soon as their weight lightens. The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform.

When, as repeatedly happened, peace was admitted to be war, the Europeans, it has been well said, showed themselves 'ready to fight to the last Indian'.

Once men inure themselves against the obvious injustices of slavery and defend its use for the economic advantages they believe it brings, humanity deserts them

Fascists are not human. A snake is more human.

The world has enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolvar from here and in their own way crucified him . . . have taken control of the riches of the world.

We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world.