Against Oppression Quotes

#1. You don't know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don't know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!

Gustav Landauer

#2. Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression.

Che Guevara

#3. It's my luck to be at the frontier of what looks to be a resurrection of roots music on the international scene. That's really what reggae music is about: that voice against oppression and struggle.

Damian Marley

#4. And so it began, I thought, the first wave of a revolution against oppression, fought with corn syrup and chocolate.

Chloe Neill

#5. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

Bell Hooks

#6. Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

#7. I think violence is part of the struggle against oppression. If something bad happens to these people [animal researchers], it will discourage others. It is inevitable that violence will be used in the struggle and that it will be effective.

Jerry Vlasak

#8. All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.

Seyla Benhabib

#9. I am fighting a fight against oppression where the poor and women are being violated

Mukhtar Ma'i

#10. James Madison made clear in Federalist 51 that that this elaborate structure - today often derided as " gridlock " - was created to protect individual freedom against oppression by the majority or by powerful interest groups who exploit government power for their own purposes.

Anonymous

#11. Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

Eugene Jarecki

#12. You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.

Learned Hand

#13. The power of citizenship as a shield against oppression was widely known from the example of Paul 's Roman citizenship, which sent the centurion scurrying to his higher-ups with the message: "Take heed what thou doest: for this man is a Roman".

Robert H. Jackson

#14. I have no country...my countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression- it does not matter where they are. With them I feel at home- we understand each other. Others are foreign to me." -Agnes Smedley in Daughter of Earth

Agnes Smedley

#15. Men, I think, are not capable of doing nothing, of saying nothing, of not reacting to injustice, of not protesting against oppression, of not striving for the good of society and the good life in the ways they see it.

Nelson Mandela

#16. It is impossible to Name and Act against oppression if there are no Nameable oppressors.

Mary Daly

#17. Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.

Lysander Spooner

#18. Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!

J.K. Rowling

#19. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Tom Standage

#20. It is evil things that we will be fighting against-brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution-and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.

Neville Chamberlain

#21. The revolt against any oppression usually goes to an opposite extreme for a time; and that is right and necessary.

Tennessee Celeste Claflin

#22. We are a conspiracy of hope and we are pressing back against the strong tide of oppression which for centuries has been the legacy of those of us who are labelled with mental illness. We are refusing to reduce human beings to illnesses.

Patricia Deegan

#23. An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.

Eugene Ionesco

#24. We have learned that change cannot come through war. War is not a feasible tool to use in fighting against the oppression we face. War has caused more problems. We cannot embrace that path.

Rigoberta Menchu

#25. Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations.

Vladimir Lenin

#26. A people armed and free, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression.

James Madison

#27. Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.

John D'Agata

#28. Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression.

James K. Polk

#29. If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.

Lysander Spooner

#30. The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

H.L. Mencken

#31. America and its allies are engaged in a war against a terrorist movement that spans all corners of the globe. It is sparked by radical ideologues that breed hatred, oppression, and violence against all of their declared enemies.

Kenny Marchant

#32. If Saddam Hussein committed crimes such as political oppression against the Iraqi people, it should be resolved legally in a fair and just manner which doesn't paint a sense of injustice

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

#33. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It, London: Pluto Press, 1973.

Philippa Gregory

#34. History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

#35. To me, every dirty act was simply a sacrament of sin, a passionately religious protest against Christianity, which was for me the symbol of all vileness, meanness, treachery, falsehood and oppression.

Aleister Crowley

#36. Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.

Robin Morgan

#37. Too often, systems of oppression turn those who are the targets of the oppression against one another.

Tim Wise

#38. Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human...

Anita B. Sulser PhD

#39. Together we have travelled a long road to be where we are today. This has been a road of struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression.

Thabo Mbeki

#40. He (Thomas Paine) saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar; venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the strong

Robert Green Ingersoll

#41. They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.

Kahlil Gibran

#42. The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

Chuck D

#43. The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.

Iain Banks

#44. I am against all kinds of oppression. Poverty, Sexism, racism, terrorism, classicism, imperialism, heterosexism, Cisgenderism, colorism, Ableism, and Nativism. Because it hinder human progression.

Henry Johnson Jr

#45. 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

#46. Since 1996, the Feminist Majority Foundation has been immersed in a campaign to support Afghan women and girls in their fight against the brutal oppression of the Taliban.

Eleanor Smeal

#47. In 1559, Duke Frederick III was summoned before the Emperor Ferdinand I at Breslau to answer the accusations of extravagance and oppression brought against him by the Silesian Estates and was deposed, imprisoned, and his son Henry XI given the Ducal crown instead.

Sabine Baring-Gould

#48. Opting for peace does not mean a passive acquiescence to evil or compromise of principle. It demands an active struggle against hatred, oppression and disunity, but not by using methods of violence. Building peace requires creative and courageous action

Pope John Paul II

#49. Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

Roland Barthes

#50. Earth and air, fire and water, the stars in their courses, the high tide of destiny and the Will of divine Providence are all arrayed against the forces of oppression. -- Louis Gregory

Janet Ruhe-Schoen

#51. But whether the resistance against government tyrants is non-violent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism.

Ron Paul

#52. One is that if women's sexuality in Africa wasn't under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren't subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn't have a pandemic.

Stephen Lewis

#53. An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.

Edmund Burke

#54. Our history in this country dates from the moment that restless men among us became restless under oppression and rose against it ... Agitation, contentions, ceaseless unrest, constant aspiring
a race so moved must prevail.

Timothy Thomas Fortune

#55. Thus the right of nullification meant by Mr. Jefferson is the natural right, which all admit to be a remedy against insupportable oppression.

James Madison

#56. The people of Nicaragua were suffering oppression. This made us develop an awareness which eventually led us to commit ourselves to the struggle against the domination of the capitalists of our country in collusion with the U.S. government, i.e. imperialism.

Daniel Ortega

#57. Public protests against globalization - protests that occur by and large in the prosperous West - denounce free trade and the mobility of capital as instruments of exploitation and oppression.

Thomas Woods

#58. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#59. For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.

Natsuo Kirino

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

Emily Bronte

#61. It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.

James Madison

#62. America is just the country that how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Peter Kropotkin

#63. If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it.

Molly Crabapple

#64. When forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken.

Che Guevara

#65. If you see oppression, violence, injustice and evil deeds, unzip your silence and uncaring indifference, do something and act against all these unethical instances." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from my novel, If I Could Tell You

Angelica Hopes

#66. We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.

Andrea Dworkin

#67. All human beings have a right, and duty, to be joyful. Anything that thwarts this spiritual human right goes against the very purpose of human being. Spirituality mandates us to wage a relentless war to eradicate these forces of oppression and disempowerment.

Agnivesh

#68. Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession - to defend it against every thrust from within or without.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#69. Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.

Ezra Pound

#70. History is a record of the incessant struggle of humanity against ignorance and oppression.

Helen Keller

#71. Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.

DaShanne Stokes

#72. If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.

Desmond Tutu

#73. If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

Audre Lorde

#74. Our forefathers would think it's time for a revolution. This is why they revolted in the first place ... They revolted against much more mild oppression.

Ron Paul