Best 523 quotes in «oppression quotes» category

There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.

There's something quite magical that can happen when a secret is no longer a secret - or is a shared secret or a common secret. By allowing those boundaries to be porous, certain forms of oppression may be lifted.

The revolt against any oppression usually goes to an opposite extreme for a time; and that is right and necessary.

There is no happiness for him who oppresses and persecutes; no, there can be no repose for him. For the sighs of the unfortunate cry for vengeance to heaven.

The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority.

There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination, in the response.

Through its appropriation of "texts of terror" and especially through the application of those texts to the Jews, the Christian religion created the conditions for the oppression of Palestinians.

The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.

Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.

The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others.

Too often, systems of oppression turn those who are the targets of the oppression against one another.

We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.

Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression--how long before the pot boiled over.

When a system of oppression has become institutionaliz ed it is unnecessary for individuals to be oppressive

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood…We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.

Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all.

Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

A black market is the part of a free market that refuses to knuckle under to government oppression.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?

ABYSS Our country lives Among the dead And dies among the living Sometimes.

According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we.

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

Actually, another problem which I think must be faced is that at any particular point in human history people have not understood what oppression is. It's something you learn. If go back to, say, my parents or grandmother, she didn't think she was oppressed by being in a super patriarchal family where the father would walk down the street and not recognize his daughter when she came because—not because he didn't know who she was, but because you don't nod to your daughter. It didn't feel like oppression. It just felt like the way life works. I mean, what psychic effects it had internally—well, that's a complicated question. But, as anyone involved in any kind of activism knows—say the women's movement—one of the first tasks is to get people to understand that they are living under conditions of oppression and domination. It isn't obvious, and who knows what forms of oppression and domination we are just accepting without even noticing them. At some further stage of self-enlightenment and communal understanding we will recognize that those are the things we have to deal with and we can't plan for them if we don't know about them.

With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation.

After centuries of marginalization and neglect, we need to cast our own movements, projects, and ideas as a battle for relevancy in the face of historical manipulation, exploitation, and oppression. We need to fight, tooth and nail, for equity in all areas of social life. One point to make clear, ethnic and racial minorities are not looking for scraps or a handout from the old paternalistic system but an equitable, stable, and leveled playing field.

After that, we were like flies stuck in honey, alive but not really living.

A hero is one who can never stop fighting for truth no matter the oppression

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

A human being can only take so much when their basic rights as a citizen of the earth are being denied to them – or sold at a high cost.

A human, caught under the oppression of a foreign nation in his/her own country, can be willingly to risk his/her life in order to achieve freedom. To call this act a self-sacrifice, one would have to presume that the person didn’t mind living as a slave of the British. The selfishness of a person who is willing to die, if necessary, fighting for his/her freedom, lies in the fact that he/she is unwilling to go on living in a world where he/she is no longer able to act on his/her own rules and regulations, that is, a world where rudimentary human conditions of existence are no longer possible.

A lack of concern about the plight of a “breeding” sow on a factory farm is also a result of normative systematic oppression – speciesism.

All human beings are systematically socialized to oppress cattle, chickens, snakes, mice, dogs, and all other nonhuman individuals. After the fashion of Sojouner Truth, might cows and chickens ask: “Ain’t I a female, too?” And would not dogs and snakes ask, "Ain't I a living being, too?

Activists must not work against one another in their single-minded dedication to one specific cause. Those fighting to protect horses must not eat cattle. We do well to specialize, but we do not do well if we specialize without knowledge of interlocking oppressions—or without the application of that knowledge.

All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.

All we have is now, this moment. If you live in the future, you’ll miss things, right here, right now, and you’ll regret it later.

All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

And, sincerely, we respect her stance. The Liberal Rednecks are all about standing up for your beliefs even when they’re hateful, bigoted, and go against everything your alleged Lord and Savior stood for. The thing is, doing that would have involved quitting her job—but that’s just something the four-times-married mother was not prepared to do for her faith. Go on TV and be called a hero by powerful politicians who agree with her and her “stand”? Sure, that’s fine. Have the Church pay for her legal bills and prop her up (instead of, oh we don’t know, giving that money to the poor)? Yes, sir. But actually quit instead of breaking an oath (which, by the way, is a sin)? That’s just something Jesus apparently wouldn’t do. Kim Davis is an analogy for Christians at large in the South. She was not oppressed. She was not forced to do anything. She could have quit. The truth is she did not want to quit her job as an elected official. She wanted to bend the political will of those around her so she could prevent other humans from marrying each other because she didn’t like the idea of it. That’s not oppression—that’s someone trying to use the inordinate amount of power they have (over the media and literally as the clerk) to affect the lives of strangers she disagrees with. Guess what that is? Yup. That is oppression.

All oppression starts with the experience of Lack. A lack of ideas, creativity, money, investors, health, friends, love, or kindness. Lack creates the emotional effect of Depression.

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy. The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS. The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.

All my contemporaries— hundred-and-fivers or convicts— will tell you how we lived in barely sentient fear, raising children for the executioner, prison, or the torture chamber.

And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day.

An individual excels where the institution fails.

Any religion-based state has a mission to limit the minds of its people, to fight the developments of history and logic, and to dumb down its citizens. It’s important to stand in the way of such a mentality, to deny it from continuing its mission to murder the souls of its people, killing them deep within while they are still alive and breathing.

[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.

As a result of this greed for power, the poor is not only silenced but also oppressed.

As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other...Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.

As artists, it is our job to question the rules and ask if they are relevant or outdated, necessary or arbitrary, helpful or oppressive.

As I'd seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims sometimes don't notice when they become oppressors.