Oppression Quotes

Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.

And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but has...

Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently ...

It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeg...

But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool...

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight ...

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - ...

Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that w...

Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small...

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over ...

Take terrorism, one example among the methods used in that struggle. We know that leftist tradition ...

Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued viole...

It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing...

Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no mor...

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the ce...

When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must no...

If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so t...

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, t...

The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the ...

Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who lov...

In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would ...

All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fe...

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.

We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

The world, in spite of oppression, is a beautiful place.

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for i...

Christmas has become a public affirmation of the power and benignity of the state, to which we all m...

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expe...

This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion ...

I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insu...

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to es...

Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindne...

No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied ...

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educat...

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it lea...

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another ...

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of...

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the ...

When I look at people talking about intersectionality, what I see is the human being magnifying a bi...

I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the...

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of o...

The severest trial of oppression is the constant outrage which one suffers at the thought of the opp...

..the struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domin...

As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more impor...

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradic...

The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man ...

The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world's one hope.

Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and u...

When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fig...

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reje...

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind...

I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to b...

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of ...

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; eve...

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

119When you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you...

The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black Ameri...

... [T]he other lesson history has taught us - that tyranny and oppression are no match for compassi...

If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take side...

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

However miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises ...

So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably a...

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in wha...

It requires something more than personal experience to gain a philosophy or point of view from any s...

Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us w...

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softene...

In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the ...

In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the ...

Albanians are a nation of freedom fighters who know something about living under oppression.

The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest ca...

At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of th...

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one clas...

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate...

e have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibl...

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture ...

And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, se...

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her an...

It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bib...

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning th...

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and huma...

In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; w...

«Couldn't never be nothin' but a nigger, if I was ever so good,» said Topsy. «If I could be skinned,...

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the...

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some t...

The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either si...

Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much...

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually ...

The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which...

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments,...

In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, tha...

. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, ...

I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is...

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principl...