Quotes About Oppression

it may be very clear indeed who "owns" culture. It is pronounced in the official language all must learn to speak, is declared if you can't afford to buy the garments that you are employed to sew, and is evident if your call to 911 fails to bring emergency assistance to your neighborhood.

Let us emphasize instead that owing to complex, uneven material histories of colonization and the oppression of racialized groups within the United States, the sites of minority or colonized literary production are at different distances from the canonical nationalist project of reconciling constituencies to idealized forms of community and subjectivity.

You need somebody to stand up for you. You're the little guy, you just don't realize it yet. The Commonwealth has all the aces, and you don't even know you're playing cards.

The darkest hours of history have always been born of the efforts of one people to dehumanize another.

Feminism directly confronts the idea that one person or set of people [has] the right to impose definitions of reality on others.

It was the first time many of the women had spent time in a bonafide workplace apart from a classroom, and they discovered what workplaces are and have been since the dawn of time: places where one is annoyed and thwarted and underpaid and interrupted and under appreciated.

A crown is a pitiless master, harsher than the staff of a pig-keeper; while a staff bears up, a crown weighs down, beyond the strength of any man to wear it lightly.

A man can no more justly make use of another's necessity to force him to become his vassal by withholding that relief God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and with a dagger at his throat, offer him death or slavery.

Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins.

There is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression.

As usurpation is the exercise of power which another has a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to.

There is a subtle difference between being a prisoner and being a slave. I don't mistake either for being free.

I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.

I could see that between the two regimes, the Pahlavis must now seem infinitely preferable to the reality of the Islamic Republic. If oppression is a dish that must be served with a side order, then let it be glamour and excess rather than religion and hypocrisy.

Thirty-five years of intimidating and dreary Islamic rule had created a rose-tinted view of the pre-revolutionary era. The arrests, the intimidation, the decadence of the elite, the horrors of SAVAK; it had all been forgotten, replaced by a revised, romantic version of the good old days. Among Iranians of a certain age and class, the swinging sixties and seventies are recalled with a poetic yearning nostalgia; an era of mini-skirts, freedom and hedonism.

Damned, damned be the rich! May not even their fingernails be left!... I'm sure that they are going to Hell head-first.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

The idea that the object of constitutions is not to confirm the predominance of any interest, but to prevent it; to preserve with equal care the independence of labour and the security of property; to make the rich safe against envy, and the poor against oppression, marks the highest level attained by the statesmanship of Greece.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Ten cents a dance—That's what they pay me;Gosh, how they weigh me down!Ten cents a dance—Pansies and rough guys,Tough guys who tear my gown!

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty. --George Bernard Shaw

it wasn't just bad guys who hurt young girls, it was bureaucracy. Pride. Territorialism

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.