Quotes About Repression

When some protesters destroy cars and burn shops, they symbolically attack private property that is the basis of capitalism. When they attack police officers, they symbolically reject and challenge repressive state forces - forces that primarily protect the capital.

Hot.  Tropical, damp climates always made the skin sticky and hot.  Feverishly so.  Sometimes, I thought my very flesh would melt and hang from my bones like Spanish moss.  In Paris I whirled in lightness and freedom . . . flinging the past away until I felt cool and alive again.  But . . . the oppression came back, didn't it?  I shivered, it still held me down, sucked my breath away.

In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They'd been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness.

I never told you that, even after telling you I love you, all those times all that day, I never told you how beautiful it was then, like everyone was telling us not to be.

Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there—watching and waiting.

The spring of love becomes hidden and soon filled up.

Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.

Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy has turned into premature death?

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

We had long thought of them as a tableau; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a straddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.

Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine and the local tailoring, just off his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it.

The repressive fifties were giving way to the rebellious sixties, symbolized by miniskirts and Playboy magazine and the young, progressive-thinking family in the White House. Elizabeth's great achievement during this period was that she made the public want her as she was: she made being sexy, independent and defiant of cultural norms the desirable way to be.

Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

Emotionally stable parents share their children's joy and quiet their fear. But caretaking roles are reversed for children of borderlines whose mothers are chronically upset. Children repress their fear in order to calm their mother. Situations that should frighten children may not because they have learned not to feel.

those who had been obliged to be silent for nearly forty years were once again being told that there could be no public recognition of their past lives or memories.

the machinery of direct repression.

most of the regime's practices, whether via direct repression or the punitive dimension which autarky inserted into everyday life, can be encapsulated as teaching the defeated the meaning of their defeat.15

the story of how "Francoism" was built – bottom up as a repressive, carceral society – as well as top down as a political regime.

extra judicial murder (the ley de fugas – prisoners "shot while escaping")

The kind of killing perpetrated by civilian vigilantes – often called the "hot repression" – tended to be what happened in the period immediately after rebels took control of a specific town or village.

the tens of thousands of people killed in the Francoist repression – by the end of the 1940s the figure was at least 150,000

The Franco regime's imperative of "cleansing" repression borrowed heavily from an apocalyptic, manichean brand of Catholicism (harking back to the Counter-Reformation) with its dialectic of fire and sword, where the suffering of the "heretic", his or her "penitence" was a necessary part of the process.

Amnesty's investigation into the judicial processes of the hundred or so governments that impose the death sentence (the United States and Turkey are the only NATO countries that continue to execute) has revealed that without exception, the penalty of death is disproportionately meted out to "the poor, the powerless, the marginalized or those whom repressive governments deem it expedient to eliminate. No government gets it right.