Oppression Quotes - Page 26

Whiffle [whine and wheeze and snuff and sniffle]: The annoying scratchy sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of women and, houndlike, sniff out evidence of male oppression.

Camille Paglia

Feminist, Suffering, Feminism

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In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

Camille Paglia

Law, Civilization, Tyrants

Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.128, Yale University Press

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...I believe it is now the duty of the slaves of the South to rebuke their masters for their robbery, oppression and crime.... Nostation or character can destroy individual responsibility, in the matter of reproving sin.

Angelina Grimke

Believe, Character, Responsibility

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When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions.

Ana Castillo

Suicide, Cancer, Political

Ana Castillo (1995). “Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma”, Plume Books

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... feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, orwe are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.

Bell Hooks

Commitment, Space, Feminist

bell hooks (2012). “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”, p.78, Routledge

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A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women.

Bell Hooks

Race, Class, Diversity

bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.5, Routledge

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. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.

Bell Hooks

Pain, Stress, Play

bell hooks, Cornel West (2016). “Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life”, p.110, Routledge

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... some of my people could have been left [in Africa] and are living there. And I can't understand them and they don't know me and I don't know them because all we had was taken away from us. And I became kind of angry; I felt the anger of why this had to happen to us. We were so stripped and robbed of our background, we wind up with nothing.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Taken, Wind, People

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I'm not interested in
who suffered the most.
I'm interested in
people getting over it.

Naomi Shihab Nye

People, Not Interested, Over It

Naomi Shihab Nye (1994). “Red Suitcase: Poems”, p.21, BOA Editions, Ltd.

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In any conflict area, it is always the women who are the first point of attack. But I think the more they have seen of oppression and violence, they have gotten more brave, more strong, more fearless than they were. You see this refusal to just keep quiet and do as you are told.

Fatima Bhutto

Leadership, Wisdom, Strong

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...Jews must learn to say without excuse, without equivocation: despite our history and our powerlessness in the past, despite allthe injustices that we have endured--today, now, the Palestinians are the victims of oppression, and their oppressors are the Israelis.

Irena Klepfisz

Past, Today, Injustice

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No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child ... No slave was ever so much the property of his master as the child is of his parent ... Never were the rights of man ever so disregarded as in the case of the child.

Maria Montessori

Children, Men, Rights

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Though oppression may give rise to violent and repeated outbreaks, like the convulsions of a man in pain, it cannot mature a settled purpose and plan of regeneration, unless a new notion of happiness is joined to the sense of present evil.

Lord Acton

Pain, Men, Evil

Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom: Great Event”, p.224, VM eBooks

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When you dream, all the scenery, characters, events, perils, and outcomes are built from your own consciousness, the darks and oppressions as well as the delights. Same with the world awake, though it takes you longer to build it.

Richard Bach

Dream, Character, Events

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History affords us many instances of the ruin of states,
by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and
genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one
part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened.

Benjamin Franklin

Law, People, Political

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This is what the government is, has always been, the creator and defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge. To hope that it can ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions. They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law, or to come to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there is any excuse for government.

Voltairine de Cleyre

Dream, Revenge, Heart

Eleventh of November 1887: Haymarket Memorial Speech by Voltairine de Cleyre, delivered in Chicago, contentdm.library.uvic.ca. 1901.

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Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Long, Evil, Accepting

Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1964). “A Martin Luther King Treasury”

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People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Aldous Huxley

Love, Technology, Thinking

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Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.

Simone de Beauvoir

Christian, Littles, Ideology

Simone de Beauvoir (1963). “Nature of the second sex”

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History of Ireland--lawlessness and turbulency, robbery and oppression, hatred and revenge, blind selfishness everywhere--no principle, no heroism. What can be done with it?

William Allingham

Revenge, Hatred, Selfishness

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all outcast peoples struggle to be recognized as individuals. The damage of oppression is that it robs you of your individuality. You're just a faggot. Or whatever - fill in the blank. Everything you do is seen through the prism of your gayness or your womanness or your blackness by some people.

Rita Mae Brown

Struggle, People, Individuality

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Oppression works in such a way that it holds every person responsible for the acts of any wrongdoer of the oppressed group.

Rita Mae Brown

Groups, Way, Discrimination

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If thou desire to purchase honor with thy wealth, consider first how that wealth became thine; if thy labor got it, let thy wisdom keep it; if oppression found it, let repentance restore it; if thy parent left it, let thy virtues deserve it; so shall thy honor be safer, better and cheaper.

Francis Quarles

Parent, Honor, Desire

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Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth.

Robin Morgan

Silence, Firsts, Spills

Robin Morgan (2001). “The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism”, Washington Square Press

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Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.

Edmund Burke

Wise, Men, Mad

Edmund Burke, Robert MONTGOMERY (Author of “Satan.”.) (1853). “Edmund Burke: being first principles selected from his writings. With an introductory essay by Robert Montgomery”, p.153

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