Oppression Quotes

If we have learned anything from the liberation movements, we should have learned how difficult it is to be aware of the ways in which we discriminate until they are forcefully pointed out to us. A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.

~ Peter Singer

When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression

~ Unknown

After centuries of marginalization and neglect, we need to cast our own movements, projects, and ideas as a battle for relevancy in the face of historical manipulation, exploitation, and oppression. We need to fight, tooth and nail, for equity in all areas of social life. One point to make clear, ethnic and racial minorities are not looking for scraps or a handout from the old paternalistic system but an equitable, stable, and leveled playing field.

~ Martin Guevara Urbina

It is difficult to exaggerate the adverse influence of the precepts and practices of religion upon the status and happiness of woman. Owing to the fact that upon women devolves the burden of motherhood, with all its accompanying disabilities, they always have been, and always must be, at a natural disadvantage in the struggle of life as compared with men....With certain exceptions, women all the world over have been relegated to a position of inferiority in the community, greater or less according to the religion and the social organisation of the people; the more religious the people the lower the status of the women...

~ Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

~ Andrea Dworkin

Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression.

~ Paulo Coelho

Ignore the voice that scorns and ridicules to ensure it does not mold you. Stifling subtleties like these, if unchecked, are oppressive. Freedom is a love supreme birthright, not a privilege to be governed by any other.

~ T.f. Hodge

Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.

~ Criss Jami

The masters and overseers were so good at employee development, in their absence, the employees still achieved the company's mission

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.

~ Christopher Hitchens

However miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery.

~ Emily Brontë

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

~ Emily Brontë

The masculine ideal of perfection creates a hyper-sensitivity to any nuance of imperfection. Any man who commits his life to the perfectionistic ideal of masculinity is going to feel like a failure. The people around him will feel abused and oppressed by him. The only way to do things is his way, the right way, the ideal way. Every man who succeeds at this game will wind up in the same place: Alone in his victory. At the top of the pyramid there’s no room for anyone else.

~ Mary Crocker Cook

All religions, in their pure form, will tell you God is Love. And power, fear, division, judgment, oppression, hatred and self-righteousness are the opposite of Love. So going to war, for example, in the name of religion, is a complete contradiction. No pure religious leader would ever support this.

~ The Truth

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

~ James Baldwin

We do not require man’s religion for salvation. We do not believe in anything that forces people to keep their places in this world.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

If we know one thing from experience it is that oppression does not crush rebellion, no matter how it tries,' I told him. 'It breeds it anew with every tyrannical act.

~ Isobelle Carmody

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

~ Booker T. Washington

No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

~ Yaa Gyasi

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

~ Ntozake Shange

e have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.

~ Frederick Douglass

The thing about oppression is this: when you hold someone down, you, too, have to be there to make sure they don't move.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

~ Sheila Jeffreys

But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. - Ward 9

~ Will Self

Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.

~ Thomas Paine

In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control is now humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite countries. Still you do hear the incompetent echo in the tapped hotel telephone, you do notice that people look over their shoulders when talking in restaurants - the secret police are dormant but not forgotten; you feel in your bones, as you would a threatening change in the weather, every change in Russian mood or action. This is not and air we have ever breathed; I doubt if we would be strong enough to resist such a climate and stay as healthy in spirit as the Poles.

~ Martha Gellhorn

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

~ Wally Lamb

When the clouds over the land rise like a mountain, a long with it's wishes, it can never cover the errors and mistakes made by Kings.

~ Auliq Ice

That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom.

~ James C. Scott

In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the Pe

~ Eugene V. Debs

ABYSSOur country livesAmong the deadAnd dies among the livingSometimes.

~ Visar Zhiti

When opposition presses (OPPRESSION) one has to persevere, press, push back but never allow yourself to be pressed like a grape unless the juice is your victory wine.

~ Eveth Colley

Remember: Oppression thrives off isolation. Connection is the only thing that can save us.

~ Yolo Akili

If it would destroy [a 12-year-old boy] to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?

~ Tony Porter

Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.

~ Wilhelm Reich

Society's revenge matched its fright.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

First oppression is made into an excuse for terrorism, and then terrorism is made into an excuse for oppression.

~ Michael Walzer

Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.

~ Mikhail Bakunin

The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly. Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,Could never be friendly ourselves.

~ Bertolt Brecht