Quotes About Injustice

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom.

I am the mother of this child. I am the one who carries it in her body. I am the giver of its life. Yet I have almost nothing to say about its coming into the world.

What kind of world permitted such terrible injustice, where good men were stripped of everything and soulless creatures of malice and hatred survived to glory in their pointless death?

How did we Humans come to be so disdained and marginalized that subjugating us like cattle became our future?

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

Men and women do not live by culture alone, the vast majority of them throughout history have been deprived of the chance of living by it at all, and those few who are fortunate enough to live by it now are able to do so because of the labour of those who do not.

Socialists often speak of oppression, injustice and exploitation. But if this were all humanity had ever known, we would never be able to identify these things for what they are. Instead, they would simply seem like our natural condition. We might not even have special names for them. To see a relationship as exploitative, you need to have some idea of what a nonexploitative relationship would look like.

To those who would dominate you, knowledge must be crushed, because people who understand are people who will stand against the unfairness of the elite.

She had never asked why it was right for her to be a slave to another's desires, but not evil for them to enslave her. She was not contributing to the betterment of mankind, but was merely a servant to countless puling little tyrants. Evil was not one large entity, but a ceaseless torrent of small wrongs left unchallenged, until they festered into monsters.

Like hounds at a feast, people gather round the table of tyranny, eager for tasty scraps tossed on the floor. Not everyone will wag their tail for a tyrant, but most will, if he first makes them salivate with hate and gives license to their covetous impulses by making them feel it is only their due. Many would rather take than earn. "Tyrants make the envious comfortable with their greed.

Them's the vermin: them who take what little we can earn or make with our hands so as to promise it right back to us, expecting us to be thankful at their kind hearts; them who tempt good people to be lazy so they can rule us like they do sheep at a trough; them who took our freedom and our ways. Even a foolish old woman like me knows that lazy people don't think for themselves; they only think about themselves. I don't know what the world's coming to.

Like hounds at a feast, people gather round the table of tyranny, eager for tasty scraps tossed on the floor. Not everyone will wag their tail for a tyrant, but most will, if he first makes them salivate with hate and gives license to their covetous impulses by making them feel it is only their due. Many would rather take than earn.

I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers... this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted.

Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people, mumbled Sam. Do they? said Vimes. Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it? 'cos they torture people.

Them as can do, has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

It's an unfair world, Child. Be glad you have friends.

Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,' said Vorbis. 'So I understand,' said the Tyrant. 'I imagine that fish have no word for water.

People in chains had a tendency to look guilty.

There were people who'd steal money from people. Fair enough. That was just theft. But there were people who, with one easy word, would steal the humanity from people. That was something else.

A foot on the neck is nine points of the law.

Royalty pollutes people's minds, boy. honest men start bowing and bobbing just because someone's granddad was a bigger murdering bastard than theirs was.

Mmmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless -- people being who they are -- don't want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.

Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

Leaning against an oak tree for shade, I can't help but confront my own ignorance regarding these issues. I remember the grape boycott, but little else. It was not my struggle. That was my privilege. Now I see it differently. Acts of injustice undermine all of us. The privacy of hypocrisy is corrosive.