Quotes About Injustice

we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside.

First, Spaniard exploits Indian, then, when he had children, he exploited the half-breed, then the pure-blooded Mexican Spaniard, the criollo, then the mestizo exploits everybody, foreigners, Indians, and all. Then the Germans and Americans exploited him: now the final chapter, the exploitation of everybody by everybody else –

You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress ... No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I am concerned, as long as it is not shown to everyone of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

They cripple the bird's wing, and then condemn it for not flying as fast as they.

America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.

We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us.

Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.

the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.

You can cuss out colonialism, imperialism, and all other kinds of ism, but it's hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes.

The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.

Our responding to life's unfairness with sympathy... may be the surest proof of all of God's reality.

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering...

Yes I know my enemies. They're the teachers who taught me to fight me, compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite, all of which are American dreams.

I taught in a small teacher's college for three or four years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't.

The teachers are getting screwed, blued, and tattooed by the system.

When teachers or people in authority put me down or in one way or another tried to make me feel less than equal to what they thought I should be - my mother was on my side. It was amazing.

And to no one is this state more attractive than to those whom it is consistently denied.

Already the sahibs have done more to keep the lower castes in their places than our Hindu kings did over hundreds of years.

How was possible that a small no of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn ? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come ? Nothing could be a greater injustice, yet such had been the reality ever since human beings first walked the earth.

that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection?

La tragedia de los hombres, decía Shaltiel, no estriba en que los perseguidos y los oprimidos aspiren a liberarse y a hacerse respetar. No. La maldad está en que los oprimidos, en lo más profundo de sus corazones, realmente sueñan en convertirse en opresores de sus opresores. Los perseguidos anhelan ser perseguidores. Los siervos sueñan con ser amos.

En el mundo hay una profunda, constante e irremediable injusticia erótica. Esa injusticia convierte en ridículos e irrisorios todos nuestros incansables esfuerzos por construir una sociedad más igualitaria.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass