Quotes About Injustice

Life is so hard. I see it everywhere. I see the homeless people on the street. I see how tragically humans have hurt the earth. How terribly they hurt each other. I also know how lucky I was. I would take my privilege for granted.

What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved.

There's much protest, but it falls on deaf ears.

Os gays de hoje, os gays de ontem, somos todos o mesmo incômodo, o mesmo pessoas. Não pessoas, na verdade. Só uma coisa sobre a qual gritar.

It was so screwed up, because the thing that made us the most powerless also gave us such power. We could make them turn away. We could bother them and challenge them and mess them up. You think people are afraid of two boys in love? To hell with that. What people are really afraid of is two boys screwing.

Olmsted inquired of the man if he found it "disagreeable" to whip the slaves. "I think nothing of it," he drawled in response. "Why, sir, I wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog."5

Henoch has passed from the childhood stage of unfettered adoration for his father and has moved to a difficult point of feeling that every demand on his person is a deeply rooted injustice. Cain grimaces at the remembered familiarity of THAT.

Whiteness is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive.

Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.

The thing to remeber is that more than anything in this world, these colored people wish they were white.

After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn't afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is you thing, in which case- knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can't. Won't people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder.

I learned that people below the age of sixteen cannot deliver milk in the U.K., but I don't think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices, like summer.

Jews in concentration camps had shaved heads and tattoos. You'd think the anti-Semites would go for a different look.

Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute.

A child, a fifth-grader, has been used and discarded, a monstrous sacrifice to an unmistakable evil.

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.' 

Era un desatino que luego de un bombardeo me llevaran cadáveres de tuberculosos o de alguien que rodó por las escaleras o de un viejo que no pudo más con su vejez o de una mujer que se quedó en el parto; eran muertos de segundo orden, pues no llevaban la aureola de víctimas, sino de meros impertinentes.

Las cucarachas sobreviven, los héroes son aplastados.

Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.

His "wickedly selfish" Americans loved to celebrate their "own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.

The cynic in Douglass left him saying, "Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people." 32

In August, Douglass righteously claimed that "everyone knows that this is the slaveholders' rebellion and nothing else." The war, he said, was the work of a "privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fasten upon the Negro's flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes.

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855

too many in the mobs "have eyes, but see not, ears but hear not, and they rush to their work of death as pitilessly as the tiger rushes upon his prey."11 The beast in the dark recesses of the human psyche was in the mob, not in the victim of ritual violence.