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Quotes About Injustice

How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries?
~ Octavia E. Butler
The penalty for being too poor to be worth robbing is a beating, a rape, and/or death.
~ Octavia E. Butler
People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they're frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.
~ Octavia E. Butler
Turn a few pages and you'll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That's history. It happened whether it offends you or not.
~ Octavia E. Butler
Were all slaves so thin—underfed, overworked, and taught that most things hurt?
~ Octavia E. Butler
You're so young. It seems almost criminal that you should be so young in these terrible times.
~ Octavia E. Butler
they knew the cops liked to solve cases by "discovering" evidence against whomever they decided must be guilty. Best to give them nothing. They never helped when people called for help.
~ Octavia E. Butler
If you told those deputies the truth," I said softly, "you'd still be locked up—in a mental hospital.
~ Octavia E. Butler
After all, they knew Dad didn't kill Keith. And they knew the cops liked to solve cases by "discovering" evidence against whomever they decided must be guilty. Best to give them nothing. They never helped when people called for help. They came later, and more often than not, made a bad situation worse.
~ Octavia E. Butler
everything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn't believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside.
~ Octavia E. Butler
Jail for Bankole could have meant being sold into a period of hard, unpaid labor—slavery. Perhaps if he had been younger, the deputies might have taken his money and arrested him anyway on some trumped-up charge. I had begged him not to go, not to trust any police or government official. It seemed to me such people were no better than gangs with their robbing and slaving.
~ Octavia E. Butler
This country has slipped back two hundred years.
~ Octavia E. Butler
When men have absolute power over women who are strangers, the men rape.
~ Octavia E. Butler
Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah's Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a "cultist," or a well-to-do eccentric.
~ Octavia E. Butler
The man she worked for had a library—a whole big room full of books." "He let you read them?" I asked. "He didn't let me near them." Travis gave me a humorless smile. "I read them anyway. My mother would sneak them to me." Of course. Slaves did that two hundred years ago. They sneaked around and educated themselves as best they could, sometimes suffering whipping, sale, or mutilation for their efforts. "Did
~ Octavia E. Butler
First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died.
~ Octavia E. Butler
that we die, our very humanity slayed, whenever we choose to remain silent in the face of tyranny.
~ Unknown
When we have had some of these slaves on board my master's vessels to carry them to other islands, or to America, I have known our mates to commit these acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but of men. I have even known them gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations some of them practised to such scandalous excess, that one of our captains discharged the mate and others on that account.
~ Unknown
My life had lost its relish when liberty was gone.
~ Unknown
I had then two reasons to live: one, to work with the resistance movement and help as long as I could stand upon my feet; two, to dream and pray for the day to come when I could go free and tell the world, "This is what I saw with my own eyes. It must never be allowed to happen again!
~ Unknown
Olga Lengyel
~ Unknown
En alguna parte de la tierra, más allá de las alambradas de púas, los hombres libres se estrechaban la mano y levantaban sus vasos para desear a los demás un feliz Año Nuevo... Pero en Birkenau, las ratas estaban cebándose en la carne de los niños de Europa
~ Unknown
ograniczenie umys?owe i okrucie?stwo ludzkie nie zna granic.
~ Olga Tokarczuk
It occurred to me that every unjustly inflictd death deserved public exposure. Even an Insect's. A death that nobody noticed was twice as scandalous.
~ Olga Tokarczuk