Quotes About Oppression

The Chinese expected the white man to pay more for his burden because the British, the Pablo Escobar of imperialists, had forced them to buy opium from India in 1850 and had stolen Hong Kong.

More often than not, we come to understand this only after the crisis has passed. It is at the very moment of anger's emergence that we must recognize its empty nature. That understanding will strip thoughts of their power to build into a stream of obsession and oppression. They cross the mind without leaving a trace, like the trackless flight of a bird through the sky.

It's not incidental that Comyns and Rhys were women writers during the interwar period and just after, when a lot was permitted and a lot was denied for women. No way forward? No way back? Levitate.

To protect patrilineal descent, men have for centuries tried to control women's sexuality. Although man needs woman, he tries to keep her power under control, legislating against women's free use of her sex in case she compromises the fragile but tenacious social structure of our patriarchal society.

The awareness at each moment of what is intolerable in the world (tortures, oppression, unhappiness, hunger, the camps) is not tolerable: it bends, sinks, and he who exposes himself to it sinks with it. The awareness is not awareness in general. All knowledge of what everywhere is intolerable will at once lead knowledge astray. We live thus between straying and a half-sleep. To know this is already enough to stray.

Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impression of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake.

El silencio es el verdadero crimen de lesa humanidad.

Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.

After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some

In the course of the war, 168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion;

He has nothing useful to say about fascism who is unwilling to mention capitalism.

La Ilustración se relaciona con las cosas como el dictador con los hombres. Éste los concede en la medida en en que puede manipularlos.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

Language or "the word" tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas.

Political freedom means this: that the polis, the state, is free; religious freedom this: that religion is free, just as freedom of conscience indicates that conscience is free; thus, it does not that I am free from state, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my freedom, but the freedom of a power that rules and vanquishes me; it means that one of my oppressors, like state, religion, conscience, is free.

Lies—there you have the religion of slaves and taskmasters.

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

The ground we walk on is impacted down and hard with blood and bones of those who died unjustly. There's not one title to land or life, even your own, but was built on rape and murder, back a few years. It would take a fire indeed to burn out all this error.

I know why the caged bird sings.

Hatred is the ballast of the rock which lies upon our necks and underfoot.

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.