Quotes About Oppression

In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation.

four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking

also designed to keep girls chaste is breast ironing.

Ghosts flutter about my head and I am oppressed in spirit. My son, has it all been wasted..?

If it does not concern you that the very first act of virtually every totalitarian regime over the last hundred years has been to disarm its population, then you are beyond help.

large section of white Western liberal opinion does not recognise that it is truly racist to refrain from condemning the clerics who seek to oppress them.

Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

names of better and braver people than Assange could ever be in Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia and Belarus for their dictatorial enemies to find and charge with collaboration with the US.

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.

From the mild argument that "America had it coming" to the full fairytale that "America did it", what unites those who spin justifications about the crimes of radical Islam is that they have no sympathy for or interest in the largely Muslim populations of the poor world that it terrorises and oppresses.

Boggan got him to translate and heard how hairdressers in Baghdad had to report subversive remarks made by women under the driers. What was a hairdresser to do if her sensibly wary customers steered clear of politics? For how long could she keep telling the secret police that she had nothing to report, without running the risk of the spies marking her down as uncooperative?

Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship.

In Britain today friends of mine live like dissidents in a dictatorship. They meet in secret. They vet new arrivals to ensure they are not spies. They are ex-Muslims living in a supposedly free country who fear their enemies will damn them as apostates and kill them. How extraordinary that they must hide their true beliefs from all but intimate friends for fear of the consequences. And how shameful that they have no anti-fascist Left worthy of the name to defend them.

Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts.

Legitimate criticism of terrorist murder and the oppression of women was turned into something it was not, in this instance a prejudiced hatred of all Muslims. The threat of violent punishment hung in the air. Critics learned that the safe course was to say nothing, because they did not know where fanatics would draw their lines.

peaceful civil disobedience can work in oppressive societies that nevertheless allow protesters to protest.

they worry about Western racists, who use Muhammad's marriage to Aisha to taunt ethnic minorities. But it is as important to worry about religious extremists who use the arguments for male supremacy, homophobia and the exploitation of women and children in holy books to justify oppression – and to notice that there is not a great deal of difference between the ideologies of the religious and the racial extremists.

They did not say that it was Afrikaanophobic to be judgemental about religion, or explain that it was imperialist to criticise the beliefs of 'the other'. If a religion was oppressive or a culture repugnant, one had a duty to offend it.

hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.

Any writer tackling religious oppression has to accept that liberalism tempered the misogyny of mainstream Christianity and Judaism in the rich world after centuries of struggle, but left the poor world largely untouched. Christianity and Judaism are not 'better' than Islam and Hinduism. Free-thinkers have just made a better job of containing their prejudices and cruelties.

It was hot, and it seemed stone would tell them nothing more.

Port Central had become a sophisticated prison for its inmates, while the natives roamed a whole world.

From sympathizers viewing Sacco and Vanzetti as victims, it was only a short step to viewing them as martyrs. To their partisans they exemplified all that was admirable—innocence, virtue, and idealism—while the forces arrayed against them embodied all that was intrinsically evil: bigotry, hypocrisy, and reaction.

Supporters of the two men believed they were victims of a deeply ingrained prejudice against immigrants and radicals.