Quotes About Injustice

You are proving, aren't you,' said Philippa contemptuously, 'that to be base-born makes you a fourth-rate son of a fourth-rate little country?

I had a sense, I believe, of indebtedness. But someone trussed it in black felt and kicked it to death, as the Turks do.

make sense out of a world that could produce trips to the moon and silicon chips and computer robots and satellites, yet never touch the impoverished hearts that could still torture, terrorize and kill without mercy or feeling.

But in the meantime it makes you sick to think of it. That these people who pulled themselves up from centuries of oppression and exploitation cannot go on to decent living, to peace and progress and civilization, without the murder of their children, and the blocking of their way because two men—two men—want more power. It is incredible, it is fantastic, it is absolutely beyond all belief... except that it is true.

The powerful Western image of childhood innocence does not seem to benefit Black children. Black children are born guilty.

The law made slave women's children the property of the slaveowner. White masters therefore could increase their wealth by

Slaveholders were willing to overwork pregnant slaves at the expense of the health of both mother and child.

Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered "prime stock" to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.

A black man in San Diego who developed hypertension because of exposure to toxic chemicals lost half of his disability award after a doctor reported that blacks are genetically prone to hypertension.

The American legal system is rooted in this monstrous combination of racial and gender domination. One of America's first laws concerned the status of children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men: a 1662 Virginia statute made these children slaves.3

Men convicted of attempted rape or whom hospital authorities considered unruly were castrated to make them "easier to handle." Because they were not considered intelligent enough, none of the patients was asked for consent.

In one case, a teenage girl who was twelve weeks pregnant came to the Boston hospital for an abortion. She was told that it was too late for her to have a regular abortion and that a hysterectomy was necessary. When the medical student who observed the operation asked a resident why such drastic action was taken, the resident replied that the doctor "wanted a hysterectomy done for the experience.

The doctor told her that the effect of the procedure "would wear off." Cox's mother consented to her daughter's sterilization under a North Carolina law that allowed sterilization of mental defectives under age twenty-one if their parent consented. Cox underwent the operation, which left her permanently infertile, although there was no evidence that she was mentally defective.

But that spring Washington had ordered an end to the hormonal injections when they were linked to cancer in laboratory animals. Instead, the Relfs later learned, their daughters were sterilized.

For small Indian tribes, this policy was literally genocidal. One physician that "[a]ll the pureblood women of the Kaw tribe of Oklahoma have now been sterilized. At the end of the generation the tribe will cease to exist.

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

didn't deserve this sort of treatment; he was a dignified old man.

Ye cannae fix injustice-with more of it.

Only the disenfranchised can party with abandon.

You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.

I seriously wish that he had spent his entire childhood being serially arse-raped by teachers, scoutmasters, members of the clergy, relatives, policemen, doctors, door-to-door salesmen and all registered sex offenders within a 500-mile radius of his unprotected bedroom.

The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans "discovered" the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn't exist before Europeans saw them.

The reason they interrogated Amanda all night was to break her. Not get the truth, not get answers, not make Perugia safer, but to break her so that she would say what they wanted her to say. Amanda Knox was interrogated for eight hours. Overnight. She was denied food and water. She was denied the use of a bathroom. In a police station. In a foreign country. In a foreign language. By a dozen different officers. Without being allowed a lawyer.

I can scarcely believe the cruelty of the last century. It staggers the soul.