Quotes About Oppression

The world is an unjust place.

The great chain of fear.

They take what they want, and in return they give you only your own shackles.

The old Romans knew better; to keep people quiet they filled their bellies.

Jesus' disciples are not people lacking resources, but they are poor because they belong to this people under the oppressive and demoralizing dominion of a foreign power (e.g., Lk 6:20). They are indeed thus poor in spirit (Mt 5:3). Jesus does not focus on a concern for the poor in the sense of people who lacked resources. In

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.

The horrid old man Sinbad had to carry on his back. That's what you are. You get on the back of everything vital, everything trying to be honest and free, and you bear it down.

This was Mississippi, where for years whites shot blacks for any reason or no reason and no one cared; where whites raped blacks and it was considered sport; where blacks were hanged for fighting back.

Between 1818 and 1940, the state hanged eight hundred people, 80 percent of whom were black. Those, of course, were the judicial hangings for rapists and murderers who had been processed through the courts. During that same period of time, approximately six hundred black men were lynched by mobs operating outside the legal system and thoroughly immune from any of its repercussions

legal lynching.

You ever met anyone who's served time in Parchman prison?" "Yes sir. Met a guy in Angola who served time there." "I'm sure he was happy to be out of there." "Yes sir. Said it's the worst place in the country.

Some OPD lawyers were zealously committed to defending the poor and oppressed, and for them the job was not a stepping-stone to another career. Regardless of how little they earned or how tight their budgets were, they thrived on the lonely independence of their work and the satisfaction of protecting the underdog.

Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.

Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.

Every single thing that touches your life, religious, socially and politically, must be an instrument of your liberation or you must throw it into the ashcan of history.

Les autres [leaders de l'époque] suppliaient qu'on nous laisse entrer dans la maison de l'oppresseur, Malcolm [Malcolm X], lui, nous disait de construire notre propre maison

After all, there's no mansplaining like white mansplaining 'cause white mansplaining don't stop.

Identification is domination.

The tyranny of a majority can be just as cruel as the tyranny of a single dictator, depending on the degree of enlightenment or stupidity of the voting majority.

A fascist is a student who, seeing the representatives of a chemical industry recruiting on campus, cries, Let's chase the bastard off! We have the right to free speech but he doesn't!

Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this separation may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to concede to black men or that he wants to help black men overcome their blackness.