Quotes About Oppression

The men who had brought us whiskey and the smallpox had come with the cross in one hand and the gun in the other.

After my sister Sandra was born the doctors there per formed a hysterectomy on my mother, in fact sterilizing her without her permission, which was common at the time, and up to just a few years ago, so that it is hardly worth mentioning. In the opinion of some people, the fewer Indians there are, the better. As Colonel Chivington said to his soldiers: "Kill 'em all, big and small, nits make lice!

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

The word 'sin' is derived from the Indo-European root 'es-,' meaning 'to be.' When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, 'to be' in the fullest sense is 'to sin'.

Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.

It is impossible to Name and Act against oppression if there are no Nameable oppressors.

What men do to trees mirrors what they do to women.

What had her life been like in Venda? Or maybe, more precisely, what had they done to her? She was not the result of happy, content parents. It was like she'd been held prisoner in a cellar her whole life. She flinched at sun and an open sky. As soon as we hit the Heethe plateau, she kept her eyes straight ahead on some distant point, her focus like steel, her shoulders rigid, like she carried a heavy pack on her back.

It was as if no one noticed my strengths or interests. I was a piece of cheese being shoved into a mold... The last few years, I hadn't measured up in any way, and the more they pushed, molded, and silenced me, the more I wanted to be heard.

My anger spiked. I should have stabbed the Komizar again. Carved him up like a holiday goose, then brought his head back skewered on a sword and showed it to the crowds as proof that I had no love for the tyrant.

Once we fear to take a stand, tyranny will have won.

Sobald wir Angst davor haben, uns für etwas einzusetzen, haben Gewalt und Willkür schon gewonnen.

The human race has always found a group to marginalize--every culture, every time, every race.

Said Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking book The Second Sex , "Just as in America there is no Negro problem but rather a white problem; just as 'anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem; it is our problem'; so the women problem has always been a man's problem. . . . Men have always held the lot of women in their hands; and they have determined what it should be, not according to her interest, but rather with regard to their own projects, their fears, and their needs.

God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.

Europeans condemned Chinese foot binding, but any society that had invented the corset had a lot to answer for.

I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man's name, who bears the man's children—who plays the virtuous woman. There are too many such in the world now.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Like almost every other colored person, I couldn't tell the difference because we'd been going through a "depression" all our lives.

Prussian people who converted their whole male population into an army and their country into an arsenal, and with one voice, and animated by one heart, refused longer to bear the degradation put upon them by their King.

defective social organization and an arrogant nobility that ruined Poland.

Russians suspected of liberal tendencies were watched, and upon the slightest pretext sent to Siberia,

it was wonderful to see how freedom and equality elevate men, and the same negro who perhaps in Tennessee would have cowered like a beaten child or dog beneath an American's uplifted hand, would face him boldly here, and by equal courage and superior physical strength cow his old oppressor.

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weakness.