Quotes About Injustice

What kind of world has this become?" "A really sick one

And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.

Poverty kills far more people than all the wars in history, more people than all the murderers in history, more than all the suicides in history, not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together, structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence

The first lesson that tragedy teaches (and that morality plays miss) is that all violence is an attempt to achieve justice, or what the violent person perceives as justice, for himself or for whomever it is on whose behalf he is being violent [...] Thus, the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.

In the "lynching era," between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these "Christians" did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted. I offer my reflections because I believe that the cross placed alongside the lynching tree can help us to see Jesus in America in a new light, and thereby empower people who claim to follow him to take a stand against white supremacy and every kind of injustice.

The Gospel of liberation is bad news to all oppressors because they have defined their "freedom" in terms of slavery of others.

And certainly the history of the black-white relations in this country from the Civil War to the present unmistakably shows that as a people, America has never intended for blacks to be free. To this day, in the eyes of most white Americans, the black man remains subhuman.

Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.

takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.

The most sensitive whites merely said: "We deplore the riots but sympathize with the reason for the riots." This was tantamount to saying: "Of course we raped your women, lynched your men, and ghettoized the minds of your children and you have a right to be upset; but that is no reason for you to burn our buildings. If you people keep acting like that, we will never give you your freedom.

Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking.

This rebellion was as much the Scourers' fault as anyone's. They had sowed oppression and were reaping the whirlwind.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security —

Laws exist only for the benefit of the strong; they unfailingly justify the oppression of the weak.

Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. The lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth does when it comes out of our mouths.

1856 a Virginia master offered "a reward of six cents for the apprehension of his boy 'Sam,' who absconded some time in the month of March.… He has a down look, and, on his back, wears the stripes of a recent whipping. One tooth is knocked out, and I believe he has a scar under the left

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

Freedom of speech is a foundation of democracy, because without it citizens can't share their observations on folly and injustice or collectively challenge the authority that maintains them.

There was nothing benign about segregation, nothing accidental.

The dead hand has too long hampered the freedom of the living.