Best 523 quotes in «oppression quotes» category

Everywhere tyrants want to run our lives, but our spirits want us to be free.

Fear (...) that has no relation to capabilities or even to reality is epidemic among women today. Fear of being independent (that could mean we'd end up alone and uncared for); fear of being dependent (that could mean we'd be swallowed by some dominating "other"); fear of being competent and good at what we do (that could mean we'd have to keep on being good at what we do); fear of being incompetent (that could mean we'd have to keep on feeling shlumpy, depressed, and second class). (...) Phobia has so thoroughly infiltrated the feminine experience it is like a secret plague. It has been built up over long years by social conditioning and is all the more insidious for being so thoroughly acculturated we do not even recognize what has happened to us. Women will not become free until they stop being afraid. We will not begin to experience real change in our lives, real emancipation, until we begin the process - almost a de-brainwashing - of working through the anxieties that prevent us from feeling competent and whole.

Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization. To apprehend one-self as victim is to be aware of an alien and hostile force outside of oneself which is responsible for the blatantly unjust treatment of women and which enforces a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation. For some feminists, this hostile power is “society” or “the system”; for others, it is simply men. Victimization is impartial, even though its damage is done to each one of us personally. One is victimized as a woman, as one among many. In the realization that others are made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer lies the beginning of a sense of solidarity with other victims. To come to see oneself as victim, to have such an altered perception of oneself and of one’s society is not to see things in the same old way while merely judging them differently or to superimpose new attitudes on things like frosting a cake. The consciousness of victimization is immediate and revelatory; it allows us to discover what social reality is really like. The consciousness of victimization is a divided consciousness. To see myself as victim is to know that I have already sustained injury, that I live exposed to injury, that I have been at worst mutilated, at best diminished in my being. But at the same time, feminist consciousness is a joyous consciousness of one’s own power, of the possibility of unprecedented personal growth and the release of energy long suppressed. Thus, feminist consciousness is both consciousness of weakness and consciousness of strength. But this division in the way we apprehend ourselves has a positive effect, for it leads to the search both for ways of overcoming those weaknesses in ourselves which support the system and for direct forms of struggle against the system itself. The consciousness of victimization may be a consciousness divided in a second way. The awareness I have of myself as victim may rest uneasily alongside the awareness that I am also and at the same time enormously privileged, more privileged than the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. I myself enjoy both white-skin privilege and the privileges of comparative affluence. In our society, of course, women of color are not so fortunate; white women, as a group and on average, are substantially more economically advantaged than many persons of color, especially women of color; white women have better housing and education, enjoy lower rates of infant and maternal mortality, and, unlike many poor persons of color, both men and women, are rarely forced to live in the climate of street violence that has become a standard feature of urban poverty. But even women of color in our society are relatively advantaged in comparison to the appalling poverty of women in, e.g., Africa and Latin America. Many women do not develop a consciousness divided in this way at all: they see themselves, to be sure, as victims of an unjust system of social power, but they remain blind to the extent to which they themselves are implicated in the victimization of others. What this means is that the “raising” of a woman’s consciousness is, unfortunately, no safeguard against her continued acquiescence in racism, imperialism, or class oppression. Sometimes, however, the entry into feminist consciousness, for white women especially, may bring in its wake a growth in political awareness generally: The disclosure of one’s own oppression may lead to an understanding of a range of misery to which one was heretofore blind.

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.

First oppression is made into an excuse for terrorism, and then terrorism is made into an excuse for oppression.

For every King is right in his own eyes and rests the blame to whoever he wishes to carry it.

Fundamental to a radical and lesbian feminist politics is the understanding that 'the personal is political'. This phrase has two interrelated meanings. It means that the political power structures of the 'public' world are reflected in the private world. Thus, for women in particular, the 'private' world of heterosexuality is not a realm of personal security, a haven from a heartless world, but an intimate realm in which their work is extracted and their bodies, sexuality and emotions are constrained and exploited for the benefits of individual men and the male supremacist political system. The very concept of 'privacy' as Catharine MacKinnon so cogently expresses it, 'has shielded the place of battery, marital rape, and women's exploited labor'. But the phrase has a complementary meaning, which is that the 'public' world of male power, the world of corporations, militaries and parliaments is founded upon this private subordination. The edifice of masculine power relations, from aggressive nuclear posturing to take-over bids, is constructed on the basis of its distinctiveness from the 'feminine' sphere and based upon the world of women which nurtures and services that male power. Transformation of the public world of masculine aggression, therefore, requires transformation of the relations that take place in 'private'. Public equality cannot derive from private slavery.

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis. In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.

Generational oppression begins when what is meant to be transferred to one offspring has been taken over by reason of oppression.

God's wrath, properly, is an aspect of his love: it is because God loves human beings with a steady, unquenchable passion that he hated Apartheid, that he hates torture and cluster bombs, that he loathes slavery, that his wrath is relentless against the rich who oppress the poor. If God was not wrathful against these and so many other distortions of our human vocation, he is not loving. And it is his love, determining to deal with that nasty, insidious, vicious, soul-destroying evil, that causes him to send his only, special son.

God afflicts people for a reason

He has a way of drawing His loves back to Himself. A psyche separated from the peace (and the freedom) of Christ is liable to entangle itself in all sorts of folly and vanity, or confused witchcraft. On the one side it will preach, 'Empowerment!' But on the other it will scream, 'Oppression!' Yes, you now have the power to be oppressed: because as long as you look to be a victim, you will find yourself to be a victim.

Gradualism veiled as hope is all too often a balm to the privileged and a poison to the oppressed.

Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly. Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness, Could never be friendly ourselves.

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so ...

How is it called freedom if it is limited by those with a history of oppressing you?

How is it possible to live? Life is so hard?’ ‘You must be harder than life, Firdaus. Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.’ ‘But you are not hard, Sharifa, so how do you manage to live?’ ‘I am hard, terribly hard, Firdaus.’ ‘No, you are gentle and soft.’ ‘My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly.’ ‘Like a snake?’ ‘Yes, exactly like a snake. Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.

Hennes självbedrägeri ljög fram en vrångbild, som i mycket liknade lyckan.

Her consciousness emerges within when the beast of the darkness allows them. This beast was a conjuration of the billion innocent souls lost to the structure of modernization. He was an archetype that transcended time and reality, a governing force as natural as nature itself, and yet this darkness was a new kind, born out of technology only apparent in the last few hundred years.

How very like humans to pervert a message of love and peace to make it into an ideology of war and oppression to serve their own ends.

I am against all kinds of oppression. Poverty, Sexism, racism, terrorism, classicism, imperialism, heterosexism, Cisgenderism, colorism, Ableism, and Nativism. Because it hinder human progression.

I could reply. I could tell him that a metaphor is inadequate in the face of a bloodbath. That a Platonic inclination for dying doesn't balance out the serious decision to kill. That through the ages there has never been a great historical infamy committed for which there couldn't be found a symbol just as big, to justify it. That, in consequence, we would do well to pay attention to great certainties, to great invocations, to the great 'droughts' and 'rains'. That the temper of our most violent outbursts might benefit from a shade less enthusiasm. I could reply. But what good would it do? I have a simple, resigned, inexplicable sensation that everything that is happening is in the normal order of things and that I am awaiting a season that will come and pass -- because it has come and passed before.

I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.

If the population is dissatisfied with the condition of society, then the leaders will invariably find a symbolic issue to channel the people’s focus away from any action that threatens the powerful. 'You’re poor? That’s a real shame. Well, look at that rich NFL player who won’t kneel for the national anthem! Doesn’t that disgust you? Aren’t you pissed off about that? Pay no attention to the system that keeps you in poverty, even though you work 40 hours a week and so does your spouse. Instead, focus on Colin Kaepernick not respecting our national theme song and refusing to grovel before our national rag! Don’t be disobedient in your own interest, instead turn on someone being disobedient in his own interest! That’s the American way!' Make no mistake, for the people upset at Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem, that fight is a moral issue. They’re genuinely incensed that someone doesn’t show proper respect for the very same country that’s fucking them over, especially when it’s someone who has it better than them. 'What does he have to complain about? He makes 20 million a year! I’m stuck in a shitty job! Fuck him!' No. Fuck the corporation who doesn’t compensate you fairly for your shitty job. Fuck the country that lets them get away with it. And most of all, fuck you for being so easily distracted by symbols and pageantry that you don’t stop to take a look at who your real enemies are.

If it would destroy [a 12-year-old boy] to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?

If people in the position of power are not made to be accountable, then, ungodliness, injustice and oppression will continue to be the order of the day in the society.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

If there is any society where the leaders lack the knowledge and the importance of justice, then oppression will be a common neighbor of the citizens.

If we have learned anything from the liberation movements, we should have learned how difficult it is to be aware of the ways in which we discriminate until they are forcefully pointed out to us. A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.

If we know one thing from experience it is that oppression does not crush rebellion, no matter how it tries,' I told him. 'It breeds it anew with every tyrannical act.

Idolized my innocence, Stole it from me in the end
 Now I’m wide awaken and still paying for the poison they sold me.

...if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men's homes.

If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.

If you advocate for the censorship of speech that does not expressly incite violence, limit your own vocabulary to a set number of words for one week. Cease to use several common words or phrases you often use and watch as your ability to communicate and think diminish. Now do you still want censorship knowing it is not just the limiting of speech but thought? If you do, you may wish to look inward about why oppressive impulses come so easily when you disagree with others.

If you are blaming the oppressed rather than the oppressor you know that something is wrong.

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

If you punish them, they are your slaves and if you forgive them they are your brothers.

If you’re in America and you think Jesus was white, then I’m here to tell you today, you don’t understand the cross and you don’t understand the color. If they string you up, if they hang you from a big old tree, if they ASSASSINATE you in the name of your brothers, then: You. Are. Black. Abraham Lincoln? Cracker most his days, black in the end. Young Brother Emmett? Black. All them dead Jewboys scattered through the Southland? Even them, black. Reverend King? Black. Malcolm? Black. JFK? Black.

If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws, its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition, government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school, the church and the home in order that man may believe and obey without protest. Such a process of devitalizing and distorting personalities of the individual and of whole communities may have been a part of historical evolution; but it should be strenuously combated by every honest and independent mind in an age which has any pretense to enlightenment.

Ignorance is the supreme oppressor.

I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires - a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune".

Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.

I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?" This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematised oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the space of the dehumanised inferior.

I'm the endorser of this Earth, dedicated to God as a first born son since birth. It's a blessing disguised above this governmental curse, governing our mental is a real life nightmare, a burden never ceasing to ease even when passed the ripe age of white hair. It's old testament redemption, bless em with an inheritance is what I'm trynna mention.

In asking me to contribute a mite to the memorial to Gutenberg you give me pleasure and do me honor. The world concedes without hesitation or dispute that Gutenberg’s invention is incomparably the mightiest event that has ever happened in profane history. It created a new and wonderful earth, and along with it a new hell. It has added new details, new developments and new marvels to both in every year during five centuries. It found Truth walking, and gave it a pair of wings; it found Falsehood trotting, and gave it two pair. It found Science hiding in corners and hunted; it has given it the freedom of the land, the seas and the skies, and made it the world’s welcome quest. It found the arts and occupations few, it multiplies them every year. It found the inventor shunned and despised, it has made him great and given him the globe for his estate. It found religion a master and an oppression, it has made it man’s friend and benefactor. It found War comparatively cheap but inefficient, it has made it dear but competent. It has set peoples free, and other peoples it has enslaved; it is the father and protector of human liberty, and it has made despotisms possible where they were not possible before. Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it: for from that source it has all come. But he has our homage; for what he said to the reproaching angel in his dream has come true, and the evil wrought through his mighty invention is immeasurably outbalanced by the good it has brought to the race of men.

Incredible how the top dog always announces with such an air of discovery that the underdog is childish, stupid, emotional, irresponsible, uninterested in serious matters, incapable of learning—but for god's sake don't teach them anything!—and both cowardly and ferocious. […] The oppressed is also treacherous, incapable of fighting fair, full of dark magics, prone to do nasty things like fighting back when attacked, and contented with their place in life unless stirred up by outside agitators. […] Once I learned the tune I stopped believing the words—about anybody.

In a system of intimidation and control, people do not show how much they know, how deeply they feel, until their practical sense informs them they can do so without being destroyed.

In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would have it, that blacks are inherently inferior to whites or that homosexuals are all, by definition, sick. So what? Even if either condition truly is inherently undesirable, no manner of social pressure will turn blacks into whites or gays into straights. Social pressure will only exaggerate the handicap. It is still the prejudice, more than the condition, that does the harm.