Quotes About Injustice

Sometimes you got to lie on the outside to keep your voice loud on the inside. We don't owe the master the truth. He owes us. Nothing comes from the master. He is the thief in the night. He steals it all. And every time we have to say 'yes sir' and 'no sir,' he steals some more. But we can survive it, if we stay loud in here," she said, throwing a fist hard against her breast.

The silence of an entire race was evidence of your superiority. Fast-forward

The biggest thing the white man takes from us ain't our bodies. He takes our voices, too. He swallows up our yes's and no's like biscuits. But one day our yes's and no's will be so loud and strong they will lodge in his throat. He will have to spit them out to keep from choking. He will starve. There won't be nothing left of him except the shadows he casts on the deadest night.

After proclaiming as a virtual destiny that the oppressor could not possibly understand or empathize with the oppressed, King was offering white oppressors a second chance; they might be clueless but not hopeless. Maybe interracial understanding was possible after all. Maybe they could respond to the cry for justice if they could first feel the injustice. As

Looking back in 1964, King observed, "Negroes have straightened their backs in Albany. And once a man straightens his back you can't ride him anymore.

Instead of sitting down at lunch counters, Wallace vowed to stand in the entranceway to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama.

Am I a dog," he roared, "that you should come at me with a stick?

There are failings to which intensely religious people are sometimes prone, namely, indifference to the injustices of society, a willingness to overlook corruption within their own ranks, and a tendency to believe that attachment to God relieves one of the duty to be upright, civil, and gracious in one's dealings with human beings.

Power destroys the powerless and powerful alike, oppressing the one while corrupting the other. If we are to build a society with a human face, we must always choose the way of Exodus, with its message of hope and human dignity.

Every individual would count. Therefore every individual had to feel part of the whole, respected and given the means of a dignified life. Injustice, gross inequality, or a failure of concern for the weak and marginal would endanger society at its very roots. There was no margin for error or discontent. Without indomitable courage based on the knowledge that God was with them, the people would fall prey to larger powers.

Perry suspected that his great-grandfather had probably been a hard man: back then, union organizers had had their skulls broken, and had broken skulls in turn. These days they were the whipping boys for everything that was wrong with the economy, as though the days of child labor and dismissal without cause had never happened.

Jonathan Scott Holloway

It is a wicked world and they have taught you very little.

That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character.

We daughters of Circassian mothers were called "cats" by our sisters who had Abyssinian blood in their veins, because some of us had the misfortune to possess blue eyes. And then they spoke to us sarcastically as "your Highness," as further proof of their indignation at our having come into the world with white skin. Nor did they forgive my father for selecting as pets his two daughters Sharife and Chole from the loathsome tribe of cats.

People are kinder to the unborn than they are to the women themselves, and soon I had my ticket.

She lifted her head. "It's easier," she said, slowly, "to be angry on someone else's behalf than on my own. And yet I find I have a well of anger in me, that I have been filling for years from my own hurts. If I spill it out in defense of another, I can deny it's mine.

The keynote of government is injustice.

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!

The most violent element in society is ignorance.

The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics.

I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.

Las masas son cerriles, viles, groseras, homicidas y despreciables. Donde actúa la masa hay siempre sangre, ferocidad e injusticia. Ningún artista verdadero puede ser comunista: el arte no existe sin un sentido de aristocracia. Y las cosas bellas jamás pueden ser un bien común