Quotes About Oppression

In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain.

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionaries do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing?

He was attired like an asshole, which is to say that he wore the long black tails, gray slacks, and top hat of an English gentleman or a nineteenth-century European nobleman, their refined manners and exquisite fashions suiting them perfectly for overseeing genocidal empires that looted nonwhite countries, enslaving and/or massacring their inhabitants, and sanctifying the results with the name "civilization.

They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.

Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover - our own.

There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was "to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.

Forced," of course, is a euphemism with the exact opposite meaning, like "pacification," which usually involved a great degree of homicidal force on rambunctious natives.

Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?

The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit.

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else's freedom and independence. Ten

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing?

The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.

When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom—I was so tired of saying these words!—we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same.

The Communists are evil. They don't believe in God and they don't believe in money.

I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in

nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else's freedom and independence.

was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.

There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.

Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.

any form of government that required the repression, imprisonment, and execution of those who disagreed with it was certainly not a government of the people.

He] saw communism for the sham that it was--a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion.

In 1776 the founders of the United States of America sent a Declaration of Independence to the King of England. In that Declaration, Thomas Jefferson wrote "that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive… it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government." We are invoking this right to rise up and alter the course of our government. You have had your chance to correct America's course, and you have failed.

blackie's fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick cotton and go be a good nigger, and we would live happily ever after…" The Family, now grown to 144,000, as predicted in the Bible—a pure, white master race—would emerge from the bottomless pit. And "It would be our world then. There would be no one else, except for us and the black servants.