Oppression Quotes

I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.

~ Eve Ensler

When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.

~ Andrea Dworkin

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.

~ Philippa Gregory

A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value.

~ Allan G. Johnson

(...) psychiatrists today recognize the contortionist's act that was required of women in an age when they were expected to stifle their own healthiest impulses. (...) To be able to renounce your own achievements without feeling that you were sacrificing requires constant effort. To be lovely and unaggressive, a woman spends a lifetime keeping hostile or resentful impulses down. Even healthy self-assertion is often sacrificed since it may be mistaken by hostility. Therefore, [women] often repress their initiative, give up their aspirations, and unfortunately end up excessively dependent with a deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty about their abilities and their worth.

~ Colette Dowling

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'?

~ Christina Engela

How is it possible to live? Life is so hard?’‘You must be harder than life, Firdaus. Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.’‘But you are not hard, Sharifa, so how do you manage to live?’‘I am hard, terribly hard, Firdaus.’‘No, you are gentle and soft.’‘My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly.’‘Like a snake?’‘Yes, exactly like a snake. Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.

~ Nawal El-Saadawi

The world, in spite of oppression, is a beautiful place.

~ Assata Shakur

The only marches I have ever witnessed under a banner of so-called Christianity have been to enforce oppression and incite hatred and intolerance - and to deprive people of their equal civil rights.

~ Christina Engela

You can't fight and claim you want to be free from the oppressor while still holding tight to things the oppressor gave you.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

People either build a castle or a dungeon. The former by their virtues, pull people into positive edifices with gainful impression. The later by their vices, push people into negative huts with painful oppression.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

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

~ Teresa R. Funke

In the heart of appeasement there's the fear of rejection, and in acts of fear there are mirrors of oppression.

~ Criss Jami

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

~ Carl Sagan

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

~ Karl Marx

We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.

~ Richard Wright

Any religion-based state has a mission to limit the minds of its people, to fight the developments of history and logic, and to dumb down its citizens. It’s important to stand in the way of such a mentality, to deny it from continuing its mission to murder the souls of its people, killing them deep within while they are still alive and breathing.

~ Raif Badawi

States that are built on a religious foundation limit their own people in a circle of faith and fear.

~ Raif Badawi

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

~ Audre Lorde

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.

~ Jack D. Forbes

The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.

~ John Bowlby

If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

~ Desmond Tutu

We aren't human.Yes. We. Are. His voice turns fierce. I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.

~ N.k. Jemisin

Power is given only to those you allow to have power over you. No man was born with a master. The only master of all is the Creator, and he created all men to be free. Freedom is a God-given right, not a human-granted gift. No man should have to fight to breathe in good health and peace.

~ Suzy Kassem

Resist any form of oppression.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated.

~ Angie Thomas

How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present

~ Robert Walser

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.

~ Suzy Kassem

But for a society build on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.

~ N.k. Jemisin

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so ...

~ George Orwell

Little Maiden Encounters FearDeepest regions walked she therelittle maiden sweet and fairventured far from the pathnever a whispernever a laugh...

~ Muse

They oppressed us but unable to kill our spirit.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There are many forms of tyrants, but there are none so terrible as those stifling their own people in the name of freedom.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

~ George Orwell

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.

~ Sheila Jeffreys

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.

~ Derrick A. Bell

Weak men cannot handle power. It will either crush them, or they will use it to crush others

~ Jocelyn Murray

Those with unearned privileges often spin things as 'political correctness' to further silence those they wish to oppress.

~ Dashanne Stokes

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.

~ Philip K. Dick

The oppressor is solidary wit the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor -- when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.

~ Paolo Freire