Quotes About Injustice

what an unfair advantage the dead had over the living, for there could be no rebuttal, no denial, nothing but the accusing silence of the grave.

She wanted to order him clapped in irons, as he so deserved. But she was stopped by what she saw in the faces of the watching men: disapproval, instinctive and involuntary, but disapproval, nonetheless. They were not comfortable when power was wielded by a woman, not at a man's expense, a man who had just acquitted himself so spectacularly at Lincoln, winning their reluctant respect in a way she knew she never could.

Will did not think that was fair, but he accepted that kings were often unfair and there was naught to be done about it.

Women are the ones who must bear children, suffering the travails of the birthing chamber, and indeed, often dying to give life. And yet we have no say about what happens to the child afterward. It would never even have occurred to James Marshal to consult his wife ere he dared Steven to hang their son. No more than Louis cared how he grieved Petra by putting her children's future into the hands of a self-seeking lout like Waleran Beaumont. It is so unfair, Harry, so outrageously unfair.

Louis shook his head. Those who dismiss women as the weaker sex, he said mildly, have never met the Countess of Leicester.

We literally paid for our own oppression.

flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother's crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.

As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were 'compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions'. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.

The racism of the colonial state was also reflected in its penal code. The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority to the British to restrict movement, search and even detain people from specific groups, because their members were deemed to be chronically engaging in 'criminal' activity. This was bad sociology and worse law, but it stayed on the books till after Independence. Worse, its effects were inhumane.

If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1980s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you will irreparably damage your own cause. Is this worth it?

it is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but to their former owners, for their 'loss of property'!)

The extortion nightly have been partly excused if the taxes were being returned to the cultivators in the form of public goods or services, but the taxes were sent off to the British government in London.

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

If India's GDP went down because it 'missed the bus' of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.

Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India!

So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

The little court disappears—trade languishes—the capital decays—the people are impoverished—the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.

the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

There are no victimless colonial actions: everything the British did echoes down the ages.

India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.

And the British had the gall to call him 'Clive of India', as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him.

William Digby calculated that 'the ryots in the Districts outside the permanent settlement get only one half as much to eat in the year as their grandfathers did, and only one-third as much as their great-grandfathers did. Yet, in spite of such facts, the land tax is exacted with the greatest stringency and must be paid to the Government in coin before the crops are garnered!