Quotes About Injustice

As long as you are black, and you're gonna be black till the day you die, no one's gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you'll make it. Just pretend you're a goddamn piece of furniture. [Said to his chauffeur, Robert Parker, when Parker said he'd prefer to be referred to by his name rather than "boy," "nigger" or "chief."]

I wanted to stand up and shout that this was unfair, but loud voices were not permitted in the library.

History has a way of forgetting the mistresses of great men. Even if they have talent.

All kindness goes out the window when you put a metal collar around the neck of another person. Those poor broken souls with the scars of bondage still showing didn't look as if they'd been overwhelmed with kindness.

We have much to learn from women like Ruby McKnight Williams, who studied the California color line and devised ways to resist it, only to see it materialize somewhere else in another form.

As the historian Robert Gildea has noted, "After the war, those who had done least in the resistance often spoke the most, while those who had done the most spoke the least.

To deny James an education was attacking principles of liberty and equality upon the only ground which it ought to be supported and equality of rights. If James could not go to school, how could he hope to equip himself to earn a living?

A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.

there is no difference…between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure."

Le fait est que le gouvernement, comme un bandit de grand chemin, dit à un individu: "La bourse ou la vie." Quantité de taxes, ou même la plupart, sont payées sous la contrainte d'une telle menace.

Each conference speaker pointed out the horrors inflicted upon people of African descent in various Latin societies and their projections of black people as subhuman.

He went on to state that racial supremacy "is heresy and should be condemned.

Lots of women are doing time for love and fear.

Yet I still remember how our white suffragist sisters barred us from attending their conventions in 1901 and 1903.

Some have even gone so far as to say they will not march if Negro women are allowed to take part.

We believe that the body hath its rights — to move in a reasonable ambit — to raise, to lower its limbs — but across the face of this earth, there are every day those who suffer unforgivable torments, strapped or chained, confined in boxes or in the holds of ships. May the Lord remind me of this always as I walk free upon paths, and may I thus always give thanks unto Him for the strange, small gifts of gesture, of simple tasks done with requisite care and sphere of action.

His fingers are as fat as grubs And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips. His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam. . . . And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested [Stalin].

they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

If they see a woman they suspect of being illegally pregnant, they pounce on her and drag her to a clinic for an abortion. They are paid fifty yuan for each woman they bring in.

It's still alive, the stubborn little thing. What shall we do with it? Strangle it. We]ll register it as a stillbirth. Don't wipe its face. Illegal babies aren't entitled to have their mucus removed.

It's still alive, the stubborn little thing. What shall we do with it? Strangle it. We'll register it as a stillbirth. Don't wipe its face. Illegal babies aren't entitled to have their mucus removed.

When the people around you have lost their will to be free, then earth becomes a hell.

In April 1945, immediately before surrendering the construction site, the Germans locked 1,046 of the workers into a barn and burned them alive.

On June 9, 1942, R?žena Spieglová was one of a group of Czechoslovak Jews sent by rail transport to the Nazi concentration camp in Terezín. On June 12, they were transported farther east to a destination we do not know for sure, probably a forested area in occupied Poland. There were no survivors from that transport. My maternal grandmother was fifty-four years old when she was murdered.