Quotes About Injustice

History cannot be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

They were actors in a rigged game, I decided, and I wanted no part of it.

Justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can't be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.

A wealthy, famous, five-foot-six, 140-pound, fifty-eight-year-old white Harvard professor who walked with a cane because of a childhood leg injury would not have been handcuffed and taken down to the station merely for being rude to a cop who'd forced him to produce some form of identification while standing on his own damn property.

It's embedded in founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifths of a man. It finds

The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. . . . What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that's just a fact." — President Obama on Gates' arrest.

In truth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also weighed on me personally. Some of the earliest moral instruction I got from my mother revolved around the Holocaust, an unconscionable catastrophe that, like slavery, she explained, was rooted in the inability or unwillingness to recognize the humanity of others.

It is a fact that racial discrimination still exists in the United States and in South America.

You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender assurance is shrinking.

There is no historically consistent justification for the exclusion of women from healing roles. Witches were attacked for being pragmatic, empirical and immoral. But in the 19th century the rhetoric reversed: Women became too unscientific, delicate and sentimental. The stereotypes change to suit male convenience— we don't, and there is nothing in our innate feminine nature to justify our present subservience.

Al final, la felicidad se mide a partir de la satisfacción que una persona declara sentir sobre su propia vida, y quizá sea más sencillo estar satisfecho con ella si uno tiene dinero, se ciñe a las normas sociales, acomoda sus juicios a lo que diga la iglesia y no se preocupa demasiado por las injusticias.

Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all.

There are real problems, not just money and power, in my own lands.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

It's monstrous, what one person will do to another.

God speaks for the silent man.

God hates us, I said. Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants. They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive? When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.

But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.

White is not an origin. It's a mental construct of privilege.

There's nothing like living as a refugee in one's own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.

There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything.

When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence," she said. Mattie wasn't often bitter but when she was, she was. I didn't want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose.