Quotes About Injustice

Life was not fair. If you wanted something you had to take it. Before someone else took it from you. Neatly dissected down to its essence, life was one long series of lily pad hoppings. The quick and the resourceful were able to adapt and survive; all others were simply crushed as a more nimble creature landed on the lily pad they had occupied for too long.

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] 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.

I have never seen a contemporary history book that informs students that witch trials were also occurring across the world at that time with 500,000 put to death in Europe,45 including 30,000 in England, 75,000 in France, and 100,000 in Germany.46 Why do modern texts point out the twenty-seven deaths in America but ignore the 500,000 elsewhere? Historical Negativism.

Robert Burns, author of the book I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!,

Hiram Wesley Evans

Tattnall from 1937 to 1941 shows no white bodies were donated for cadaver use during those five years while fifty-three black corpses were taken. Racial discrimination seemed to have no end, even after death.

Rewards and penalties are totally random; knaves thrive and saints go hungry.

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

When the South has trouble with its Negroes when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need.

Education is indoctrination if you're white — subjugation if you're black.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Karl Marx disse que a religião é o ópio do povo, mas estava errado. A religião não é o ópio do povo, ela é o incendiário do povo! Nunca o mal é feito tão bem como quando é feito em nome da religião.

The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from the fleeting whim of politicians.

The surest effect of exalting government is to make it easier for some people to drag others down.

Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and consciousness they could not have possibly had...Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time.

A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end by abusing the powerless. If exposed, it will ask, paternalistically, to be allowed to repair the damage on its own.

Not satisfied with endlessly pulling drowning men from the torrents rushing past, Day went upstream to see who was throwing the poor bastards into the water in the first place—and

There is no dignity for either the sufferer or the torturer

It is ironic that America, with its history of injustice to the poor, especially the black man and the Indian, prides itself on being a Christian nation.

Thomas hated the people who'd taken this poor, innocent kid form his family. He hated them with a passion he didn't know a human could feel. He wanted them dead, tortured, even. He wanted Chuck to be happy. But happiness had been ripped form their lives. Love had been ripped from their lives.