Oppression Quotes

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

~ Horace Greeley

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.

~ Malcolm X

And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express

~ Wilhelm Reich

Just like freedom, Truth is not cheap. Yet both are worth more than all the gold in the world. But what is freedom, if there is no truth? And what is truth, if there is no freedom? Both are worth fighting for — because one without the other would be hell.

~ Suzy Kassem

I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.

~ Ayn Rand

The core of liberation theology is profoundly theologal - that is, rooted in the very nature of God. You see, there's an immediate relationship between God, oppression, liberation: God is in the poor who cry out. And God is the one who listens to the cry and liberates, so that the poor no longer need to cry out. ( Leonardo Boff, p. 166)

~ Mev Puleo

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.

~ Anne Bradstreet

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

~ Steven Chuks Nwakokeke

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

~ John Le Carré

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

~ Christine De Pizan

The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world's one hope.

~ Bertolt Brecht

As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.

~ Paulo Freire

A good man will never harm or oppress another. A good man will share his last morsel of food with others in need, and die of hunger when he no longer has any food -- instead of cheat or steal from others to survive. Selflessness. Humility. Truthfulness. These are the three marks of an honorable man.

~ Suzy Kassem

Let them shoot us in the head,My blood will grow rootsand will blossom.

~ Visar Zhiti

Sadly, atheists are becoming everything they aren't supposed to be: obnoxious, oppressive, loud, pushy, smug, condescending and annoying. Since when did the definition of atheism become an anti-religious person? It's one thing to say I don't believe in God because I see no proof in God. We'll just agree to disagree. It's another thing to make it your sworn duty to put down and berate religious people, to view them as primitive morons, to turn every conversation into a debate and to make it your mission to put forth this vision of a faith-free society fueled only by science and technology. This kind of oppression is against everything atheists stand for. Atheists believe in the freedom of choice, the choice to not be religious if one does not want to be. This does not mean being pushy or rude towards anybody else who has made their own choices to be religious. For some people, religion gives them a purpose, helps them cope with trauma and grief, gives them hope, gives them something to hold onto. So, as long as they aren't pushing their faith on others, why should atheists do the same thing to them?

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.

~ Catherine Keller

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

~ Nick Cohen

It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge.

~ Wilhelm Reich

Your anger against every form of insult and oppression must be out of love.

~ Sunday Adelaja

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

~ Sunday Adelaja

Do not waste your anger, you may just be the candidate to deliver a people from oppression or injustice.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The great and the mighty that use their assets and power to subjugate people are demonstrating oppression.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Covetousness gives birth to violence, while violence gives birth to oppression.

~ Sunday Adelaja

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.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Oppression has been in existence as long as man himself has been in existence.

~ Sunday Adelaja

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

~ Sunday Adelaja

The oppressor will always despise their victims.

~ Sunday Adelaja

It is the people who cannot stand oppression that qualifies to fight today’s modern slavery.

~ Sunday Adelaja

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

~ Sunday Adelaja

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.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

~ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

The radical implication of the expansion of higher education has been disguised by a myth which dubs all educated working class people as middle class. By definition working class people are not intelligent, so if you've got a degree you must be middle class. This nonsense is reinforced by the fact that acedemic traditions are laden with class assumptions and are presented in upper class styles even in the Polytechnics.

~ Stefan Szczelkun

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.

~ Joanna Russ

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print.

~ Margaret Atwood

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

~ Aung San Suu Kyi

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

~ Aung San Suu Kyi

When we're afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.

~ Marjane Satrapi

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

~ Winston S. Churchill

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.

~ James Lee Burke