Oppression Quotes - Page 31

• 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

  17 Copy quote

• ...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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

  Paulo Freire

  Mean, Violence, Excess

  Paulo Freire (2013). “Education for Critical Consciousness”, p.17, Bloomsbury Publishing

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Abandonment

  Gabriel García Márquez's Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the role of a writer, www.farnamstreetblog.com. 1982.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Press not a falling man too far; 'tis virtue:
  His faults lie open to the laws; let them,
  Not you, correct him.

  William Shakespeare

  Lying, Fall, Men

  William Shakespeare (1833). “The plays and poems of William Shakspeare”, p.564

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

  Amanda Lindhout

  Faces, Somalia, Unimaginable

  "Kidnapping survivor tells of 460 days of hell". Interview with Emily Bazelon, www.stuff.co.nz. September 04, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
  You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak

  Margaret Walker

  Heart, Dreamer, Violence

  Margaret Walker (2013). “This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems”, p.70, University of Georgia Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• My philosophy is such that I am not going to vote against the oppressed. I have been oppressed, and so I am always going to have avote for the oppressed, regardless of whether that oppressed is black or white or yellow or the people of the Middle East, or what. I have that feeling.

  Septima Poinsette Clark

  Philosophy, Yellow, White

  Septima Poinsette Clark (1990). “Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement”

  137 Copy quote

  Show source

• By identifying with the powerful, the disempowered achieve a measure of safety, at least for a moment. By doing the bidding of those in power, they become a necessary part of the system, useful so long as they serve to contain the stirrings and strivings of the oppressed. By making the rules and values of their oppressor their own, they separate themselves from the rest of their group and, temporarily at least, assuage the pain of their stigmatized status.

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Pain, Powerful, Long

  Lillian B. Rubin (1991). “Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution?”, HarperCollins

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am a man of peace, God knows how I love peace; but I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace.

  Lajos Kossuth

  Peace, Mistake, Men

  Lajos Kossuth (1852). “Kossuth in New England: A Full Account of the Hungarian Governor's Visit to Massachusetts ; with Speeches, and the Addresses that Were Made to Him ...”, p.46

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

  Heaven, Vengeance, Cry

  37 Copy quote

• Trying to help an oppressed person is like trying to put your arm around somebody with a sunburn.

  Florynce Kennedy

  Trying, Arms, Helping

  6 Copy quote

• Horizontal hostility may be expressed in sibling rivalry or in competitive dueling which wrecks not only office tranquility or suburban domesticity but also some radical political groups and, it must be sadly said, some women's liberation groups. ... [it is] misdirected anger that rightly should be focused on the external causes of oppression.

  Florynce Kennedy

  Sibling, Office, Political

  7 Copy quote

• What you must understand is oppression does not end with the niggers. It does not end with the poor people, it doesn't end with the women, or the pregnant women. It goes on up the line to the executive who has his bag searched in the airport.

  Florynce Kennedy

  Airports, People, Doe

  6 Copy quote

• Legality and oppression are not unknown to run hand in hand.

  Tim Hawkins

  Running, Hands, Law

  12 Copy quote

• The Christians committed all sorts of atrocities on the Jews by giving them the label "Killers of Christ". Hitler is not an exception but a culmination of the 2000-year long oppression of the Jews by the Christians

  M. S. Golwalkar

  Christian, Years, Long

  13 Copy quote

• He who, when he hath the power, doeth not good, when he loses the means will suffer distress. There is not a more unfortunate wretch than the oppressor; for in the day of adversity nobody is his friend.

  Saadi

  Mean, Adversity, Suffering

  Saadi, Francis Gladwin, Eric Serejski (2016). “Gulistan or Rose Garden”, p.154, Innovations and Information

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.

  Gloria E. Anzaldúa

  Land, Roots, White

  123 Copy quote

• These my two hands / quick to slap my face / before others could slap it.

  Gloria E. Anzaldúa

  Hands, Two, Faces

  4 Copy quote

• It is no solution to define words as violence or prejudice as oppression, and then by cracking down on words or thoughts pretend that we are doing something about violence and oppression. No doubt it is easier to pass a speech code or hate-crimes law and proclaim the streets safer than actually to make the streets safer, but the one must never be confused with the other... Indeed, equating "verbal violence" with physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business.

  Jonathan Rauch

  Hate, Confused, Law

  8 Copy quote

• It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.

  Joseph Stalin

  Jobs, Real, Home

  802 Copy quote

• The history of woman is the history of the continued and universal oppression of one sex by the other. The emancipation of woman is her restoration to equal rights and privileges with man.... Need we wonder, then, at the sad spectacle which humanity offers us? Its hideous wars, its social abominations, its foul creeds, its treacheries, vices, wants, diseases, lusts, tyrannies, and crimes are the natural outcome of the subjugation of one half of the human race by the other.

  Tennessee Celeste Claflin

  Sex, War, Men

  4 Copy quote

• If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.

  Junot Diaz

  Practice, Serious, Trouble

  4 Copy quote

• Being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression, otherwise I would have been free to be so much more.

  Assata Shakur

  Warrior, Has Beens

  19 Copy quote