Quotes About Injustice

If you liked El Salvador, you're going to love Colombia. It's the same death squads, the same military aid, and the same whitewash from Washington.

...love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon--it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power.

I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Now ain nobody tell us it would be fair no love for my father cause the coward wasn't their" {Tu Pac Shukur}

It's a funny place, this world. Hate has rights. Love has none.

A girl doesn't notice unfairness until she falls in love

We get inflamed, I guess, when people come back and try to make something of the case. It's like we heal and then the wound opens again. It was hard enough for me, but Allison lost her sister. It doesn't matter that it was in 1978.

Even when we are punished for the wrong reasons, there is always a real cause for our punishment. Every unjust act, even committed for the sake of a just cause, carries its curse with it.

As opposed to now, when it seemed like almost everything was either terrible or in the process of being made that way by entrenched assholes, while nobody gave a shit.

me. Glendin, there have been cowardly legal murders

Besides, most of the fellows that are ridin' long and sleepin' short, they have been drove out of society by the meanness of other men, and not because they wanted to go wrong.

Those poor things. They sounded so scared and angry. And why wouldn't they? What else should they feel when some horrible person released them into an environment they weren't born for?

He said that Americans are the only people he's ever met who just can't accept that bad things can happen to good people.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing. Every human instinct is to turn away. Not see. It is, I'm afraid, exemplified by Reagan who refuses to imagine the suffering of twelve million unemployed and the degradation of men and women who are deprived of work and treated in this country like pariahs.

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.

Look beyond your tasseled caps And you will see injustice. At the end of your fingertips You will find cruelties, Irrational hate, bedrock sorrow And terrifying loneliness. There is your work.

Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou?

All I got to do is stay black and die.

The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.

It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness.

It's another to the body, and it looks like Louis is going down.' My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trip of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful.

The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.