Quotes About Injustice

There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it's unfair to deprive them, but there's a greater good here that must be protected.

Mauma didn't fall again, though, and I reckoned God had lent me an ear, but maybe that ear wasn't white, maybe the world had a colored God, too, or else it was mauma who kept her own self standing, who answered my prayer with the strength of her limbs and the grip of her heart. She never whimpered, never made a sound except some whisperings from her lips.

She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow's cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her "polite education for the female mind," which was composed

I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil.

Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it's brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all.

Maybe one reason I had avoided my anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. We can allow anger's enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy.

Do what you have to do, censure us, withdraw your support, we'll press on anyway. Now, sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks.

In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything

He gazed at me with kindness and pity. "To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.

these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.

He gazed at me with kindness and pity. "To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil." I turned

My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round. I'd dismissed the words—what could she know of it? But I saw

You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred, Mary! It can't go on defining everything.

There was Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, who was raped by Shechem. Tamar, the daughter of King David, raped by her half brother.

And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

Mauma didn`t want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn`t get free and she couldn`t pop missus on the back of her head, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.

Remember this! It is never an entire people who is cruel; it is merely individuals who exert their will on others.

the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

He chuckles at his own joke. No one wants the Jews. Not even America. Americans have no right to criticize us. They rounded up their Indians, you know. Put them on reservations.

To the farmers the new tax was an example of another oppressor telling them what to do and then charging them for it.

When we are thwarted, frustrated, and punished way out of proportion to what we've done, it's inevitable that enormous anger builds inside us.

The misogynist genuinely believes that his rage toward his partner is due to her deficiencies. It is easier for him to attack her than to deal with the real sources of his rage. He feels justified in acting out rage on women. Part of this justification may come from his experiences at home as a child, but a great deal of it comes directly from our culture.

One estimate in 1906 was that for every one of the 150,000 doctors in the U.S. there was one castrated woman; some of these doctors boasted that they had removed from 1500 to 2000 ovaries apiece." Soon feminists and antivivisectionists protested against the credo "when in doubt, take them out.

It seems to me the world is almost too black to behold," Gellhorn wrote Eleanor in February 1938. "Half of it is bullied and terrorized and debased by dictators and half of it is soppy with cowardice and sloth and selfishness.