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Quotes About Oppression

He was murdered in Stalin's purges in 1940, at the age of 45.
~ Unknown
As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
It is necessary to distinguish the nationalism of the oppressing nations from the nationalism of the oppressed
~ Isaac Deutscher
The gentry's jurisdiction over the peasantry was restored. The universities were closed to the children of the lower classes; the radical literary periodicals were banned; the nation, including the intelligentsia, was to be forced back into mute submission. Revolutionary
~ Isaac Deutscher
For a subject people, independent statehood is a vital necessity and an advance; but once such a people has reached the stage of independence nothing can be more retrograde for it than to fix its mind on that stage and to refuse to look beyond it. The nationalism of a sovereign people cannot claim for itself the justification claimed by the nationalism of an oppressed people.
~ Isaac Deutscher
The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx had been forbidden. Students' libraries and clubs had been closed; and informers had been planted in the lecture halls. Entry fees had been raised fivefold to bar academic education to children of poor parents.
~ Isaac Deutscher
What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
~ Isabel Allende
Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
~ Isabel Allende
And I felt, I think for the first time, a rage against men. Not because they could say, "I'm going," and go. Not because they could go to college and become lawyers or preachers while women could only be drudge or ornament but nothing between. Not because they could be parents at no cost to their bodies. But because when they love a woman they may be with her, and all society will protect their possession of her.
~ Unknown
Crime, particularly among the poor and downtrodden, is often a last gesture of liberty.
~ Isabelle Eberhardt
Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.
~ Isaiah Berlin
The only thing which can be regarded as properly tragic is resistance, resistance on the part of a man to whatever it is that oppresses him.
~ Isaiah Berlin
Reconoce que si la libertad para los poderosos y los inteligentes significa la explotación de los débiles y menos talentosos, entonces habrá que limitar la libertad de los poderosos y los inteligentes.
~ Isaiah Berlin
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
~ Isaiah Berlin
But what was more violent than making people disbelieve in the worth of their own lives? What was more violent than making them believe they deserved less and less every day?
~ Ishmael Beah
All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.
~ Ishmael Reed
If Orwell had a chance to write 1984 from the vantage point of 1984 instead of 1948, perhaps he would have seen the class of hackers instead of the proles as a threat to Big Brother's rule.
~ Ishmael Reed
I think that when people like you , Mr. Von Vampton, say "The Negro Experience" you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds.
~ Ishmael Reed
Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.
~ Ismail Kadare
If we know one thing from experience it is that oppression does not crush rebellion, no matter how it tries,' I told him. 'It breeds it anew with every tyrannical act.
~ Isobelle Carmody