Oppression Quotes - Page 13

• Never forget that turning a blind eye to oppression and watching from the sidelines is itself opression

  Harun Yahya

  Wisdom, Islamic, Eye

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• No guarantees come with children's liberation. But neither the promise of great benefits to all nor the prediction of great difficulties ahead can serve as the reason for granting or denying rights to children. Rights will be granted because without them children are incapacitated, oppressed, and abused.

  Richard Farson

  Children, Rights, Promise

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• The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the constitution that no man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Kings, War, Men

  Abraham Lincoln (1926). “An autobiography of Abraham Lincoln: consisting of the personal portions of his letters, speeches and conversations”

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• Freedom has nothing to do with having the right to vote for your oppressor; freedom is not having any form of oppression.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Democracy, Vote, Form

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• The globalisation of information makes people aware of what they have - and have not. Problems and oppression are impossible to hide, and the new and powerful tools of information provide us with more opportunities than ever to react and act.

  Anna Lindh

  Powerful, Opportunity, People

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• The fact that 'Scrubs' is so popular in Israel is very important to me. I feel like I'm helping to cancel out the thousands of years of oppression the Jewish people have suffered.

  Zach Braff

  Israel, Years, People

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• The cost in human lives and suffering is so high that we all have to work to end violence and oppression once and for all. We have to proclaim that every human being is equal, in dignity, in freedom -and, as the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, we have to live in a spirit of brotherhood.

  Federico Mayor Zaragoza

  Rights, Brotherhood, Suffering

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• We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

  Nelson Mandela

  War, Rights, Racism

  Nelson Mandela (2012). “Notes to the Future: Words of Wisdom”, p.166, Simon and Schuster

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• Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a 'disposable' culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.

  Pope Francis

  Culture, Something New, Used

  "Pope Francis: Capitalism is 'a new tyranny'" by Katie McDonough, www.salon.com. November 26, 2013.

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• All it has experienced, tasted, suffered: The course of years, generations of animals, Oppression, recovery, friendship of sun and - Wind Will pour forth each day in the song Of its rustling foliage, in the friendly Gesture of its gently swaying crown, In the delicate sweet scent of resinous Sap moistening the sleep-glued buds, And the eternal game of lights and Shadows it plays with itself, content.

  Hermann Hesse

  Song, Sweet, Recovery

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• Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit. People, worldwide, hunger for the right of self-determination, for those inalienable rights that make for human dignity and progress. America must remain freedom's staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally and it is the world's only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace. Every blow we inflict against poverty will be a blow against its dark allies of oppression and war. Every victory for human freedom will be a victory for world peace.

  Ronald Reagan

  Determination, War, Dark

  Second Inaugural Address, delivered 21 January 1985, Rotunda of the Capitol, Washington D.C.

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• I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast . . . would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Flames, Liberty, Receiving

  Thomas Jefferson (1977). “The Portable Thomas Jefferson”, p.431, Penguin

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• The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Horse, Team, Taxation

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• The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; . . . the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.

  James Madison

  Party, Majority, Found

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (1842). “The Federalist, on the New Constitution, Written in the Year 1788”, p.47

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• [T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Block, Struggle, Men

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• 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.

  Barbara Deming

  Thinking, Choices, Enemy

  Barbara Deming (1984). “We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader”

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• Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Inspirational, Facts, Cruelty

  Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters, 1946.

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• If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Growing Up, Ethics, Victim

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.109, Vintage

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• That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Government, Liberty, Citizens

  Ezra Taft Benson (1969). “An enemy hath done this”

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• Christianity was created by some decadent and degenerated Romans as a tool of oppression, in the late Roman era, and it should be treated accordingly. It is like handcuffs to the mind and spirit and is nothing but destructive to mankind. In fact I don't really see Christianity as a religion. It is more like a spiritual plague, a mass psychosis, and it should first and foremost be treated as a problem to be solved by the medical science. Christianity is a diagnosis. It's like Islam and the other Asian religions, a HIV/AIDS of the spirit and mind.

  Varg Vikernes

  Spiritual, Psychosis, Mind

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• The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. ...Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. ...Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests.

  Linda Gordon

  Fighting, People, Together

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• Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.

  Aurora Levins Morales

  Integrity, Heart, Self

  Aurora Levins Morales (1998). “Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity”, p.125, South End Press

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• Starting from the very reasonable, but unfortunately revolutionary concept that social practices which threaten the continuation of life on Earth must be changed, we need a theory of revolutionary ecology that will encompass social and biological issues, class struggle, and a recognition of the role of global corporate capitalism in the oppression of peoples and the destruction of nature.

  Judi Bari

  Struggle, Practice, Class

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• Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury.

  James H. Cone

  Empowering, African American, Empowerment

  James H. Cone (1992). “Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare”, p.333, Orbis Books

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• While we sometimes feel and have felt in days that are past and gone, to complain because we meet with oppression, persecution, and affliction, yet I wish to say to my brethren and sisters that these things are the heritage of the Saints of God. … I have never read of the people of God in any dispensation passing through life, as the sectarian world would say, on flowery beds of ease, without opposition of any kind.

  Wilford Woodruff

  Past, People, Wish

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