Oppression Quotes

Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation.

Saying, “I don’t agree with you,” or going so far as to say, “I think your belief structure is childish,” does not amount to persecution. Insensitivity is not the same as harassment or oppression.

A nation will never be vanished by subjugation or oppression, unless they get used to.

Perhaps Bug and Tony should have been allies. But any successful structure of domination always gets the weak to reject each other.

In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control is now humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite countries. Still you do hear the incompetent echo in the tapped hotel telephone, you do notice that people look over their shoulders when talking in restaurants - the secret police are dormant but not forgotten; you feel in your bones, as you would a threatening change in the weather, every change in Russian mood or action. This is not and air we have ever breathed; I doubt if we would be strong enough to resist such a climate and stay as healthy in spirit as the Poles.

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

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

The "norm" for humanity is love.Brutality is an aberration.We are not sinners by nature.We learn to be bad.We are taught to stray from our good paths.We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.

Don't let a corrupt Media and Criminal Government continue to Brainwash You. THINK FOR YOURSELVES JAMAICANS WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

The Gelaming regarded themselves as a force for good, and in many ways they were, but they were also inexorable and their compassion could often feel like oppression.

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.

What is amazing and revolutionary today will be oppressive tomorrow.

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

Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman's hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes.

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human...

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

Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days.

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

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

The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'?

Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds thatthe dorms and classrooms can'taccommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized.When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.

The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.

I've always looked at America like a foster mother doing it only for the check. At any minute, I just knew she'd be ready to give up on me.

How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?

One hour devoted to mourning and lamenting theStolen equality of the weak is nobler than aCentury filled with greed and usurpation.

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!

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.

To stop oppression, you will first end the tyranny of the oppressors.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

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

Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.

Morality is the clipping of a bird's wings.

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive

We walked through the streets with our protectors. We wore our dresses. We gave up our education because that was the price of safety. That was the bargain we made with the devil we knew to escape the devil we didn't.

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

Individuals with greed for power see others as elements to be oppressed.

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

Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.

Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.

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

Don't oppress, don't accept to be oppressed and you will live free.

It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

Not being treated as equal IS oppression

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

The devil would be powerless if he couldn't entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between brothers.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

You can get to oppression through regulation, especially in an "Idea Economy" which necessitates liberty of the mind to explore.

The paradigm of Western culture is that the essence of persons is dangerous; thus, they must be taught, guided and controlled by those with superior authority.

I wouldn't worry about it too much, son. Certainly not about the peasants and the servants. They don't feel things as we do.”“They're human.”“Barely. They might as well be another species. What would happen without us to keep them in check? They wouldn't work the land. They would be at each other's throat if we weren't there to restrain them. Face it, they are driven by their instincts. Granted, that is a generalization, and there are some individuals who rise above that. Personally I think that is how the nobility originated. Even today, with the help of the Gods, hard work and some luck such a man can rise above his station. But as a group…

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, butthe tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression.Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa,have long expelled her.?Europe regards her like a stranger, and Englandhath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare intime an asylum for mankind.

BLOODY LIPSThe bloody woundOf the gladiatorGurgles out life's end.The cries of acclimations from the standsFill the sky with raging tigers.Waving their arms about to incite the massesThe aging notables add an air of dignity to the arena.Making their separate entriestheyKNEELover the still-warm corpsesOf the young. Their withered lips they poseUpon the fresh flowing woundsAnd, to prolong their lives – so they believe,Suck, ravenously suck out the blood, blood, blood.Fresh blood from the sunFlowing into filthy veinsAs into sewage pipes,And thus the Heart of the Nation is abandoned.

Formerly, many men dominated women within marriage. Now, despite a much wider acceptance of women as workers, men dominate women anonymously outside the marriage. Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, the working single mother is economically abandoned by her former husband and ignored by a patriarchal society at large.

Unless institutional power reinforces the hurt and prejudice suffered by a group, it is not oppression. By definition, a person of color cannot be racist, or a woman sexist, because they do not have the institutionalized power to act on their prejudices. Also, by definition, all white people are racist, not just because of the personal attitudes that we usually think of as racist, but because of the privilege white skin brings in our society. Whites cannot say they are not racist because they are born into a society that teaches racism and reinforces white privilege every day even before they can be aware of it. Whites can choose, however, to be active antiracists, which means making a commitment to a lifelong process of learning to recognize racism in themselves and in the institutions they are part of and taking steps to stop it.