Quotes About Injustice

murdered go free.

The Great Stone at the center of the Somme memorial has this inscription: "Their name liveth for evermore." The memorial contains 73,077 names, the names of young men who were robbed of life. Note that we often say that they gave their lives, but of course, this is not true; their lives were taken from them. It is not outrageous to consider the carving of their names and the false promise of "evermore" another act of violence.

I now know that my pain is not more sacred, my suffering is not more noble, and the injustice I endure is not more ill-deserved than someone else's.

It is important to notice that when Emerson said "American," he meant male white people of a certain socioeconomic standing—his. Without his saying so directly, his definition of American excluded non-Christians and virtually all poor whites. Native American Indians and African Americans did not count. In English Traits, when he tallies up the American population, Emerson explicitly excludes the enslaved and skips over native peoples entirely.4

If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity.

Reconciliation means working together to correct the legacy of past injustice.

There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile to continue talking about peace and non-violence against a government whose only reply is savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

we fought injustice wherever we found it, no matter how large, or how small, and we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity.

But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.

Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality--all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.

It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.

If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent.

The arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black from Coloured or Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of the same family were classified differently, all depending on whether one child had a lighter or darker complexion. Where one was allowed to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of one's hair or the size of one's lips.

The grave plight of the people compels them to resist to the death the stinking policies of the gangsters that rule our country….

No era la falta de oportunidades lo que limitaba a mi pueblo, sino la falta de oportunidades.

The lesson I took away from the campaign was that in the end, we had no alternative to armed and violent resistance. Over and over again, we had used all the nonviolent weapons in our arsenal—speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonment—all to no avail,

apartheid turned many otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals.

it is always the oppressor, not the oppressed, who dictates the form of the struggle.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

It was not a lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.