Quotes About Injustice

We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.

The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces.

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

The problem is not the visibility of dark skin, but who sees it and what the viewer feels motivated to do next.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they do not turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd.

In ancient times, as to-day in Asia and Africa, slaves were simply called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of "serfs", to-day they are called "wage-earners".

Either this organisation of injustice with its entire machine of oppressive laws and privileged institutions, must disappear, or else the proletariat is condemned to eternal slavery. This is the quintessence of the Socialist idea, whose germs can be found in the instinct of every serious thinking worker.

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

All you have to do is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White ... I was trying to locate myself within a specific inheritance and to use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright from which that inheritance had so brutally and specifically excluded me.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims.

Whenever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.

There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.

All women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

A force of circumstance is not poverty merely but color.

Misery begets equality.