Top 100 Oppressed People Quotes
#1. I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.
Wilkie Collins
#2. The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.
Howard Zinn
#3. Real Jews, in concord with some Muslims, continue their war against Zionists and against Israeli crimes. The oppressed people of Palestine living under occupation must feel that believers of all faiths support them.
Maurice Motamed
#4. The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.
Chinua Achebe
#5. An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.
Toni Cade Bambara
#7. Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.
Nancy Mairs
#8. The Montgomery bus boycott would have happened without King, but King's oratory helped to ensure that the boycott came one of those exceptional local movements for justice that would send ripples of inspiration to oppressed people everywhere.
Troy Jackson
#9. There are nations, where people live in captivity, fear and silence. I believe, one day from prison camps and torture cells and from exile the leaders of freedom will emerge. The world should stand with those oppressed people until the day of their freedom finally arrives.
Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj
#10. An oppressed people are authorized whenever
they can to rise and break their fetters.
Henry Clay
#11. In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed ... It means facing a system that does not lend its self to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.
Ella Baker
#12. Oppressed people are frequently very oppressive when first liberated. They know but two positions: somebody's foot on their neck or their foot on somebody's neck.
Florynce Kennedy
#13. The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
Anais Nin
#14. But see, my idea on the whole thing is, hey, it's not the responsibility of marginalized, oppressed people to educate everyone. I personally wouldn't put myself in that position and go out there and do my schtick in front of the Red Hot Chili Peppers fan guys ... because, you know ...
Kathleen Hanna
#15. I believe in self-defense and self-determination for Africans and other oppressed people in America.
Assata Shakur
#16. Palestinians are not victims in need of aid, they are an occupied & oppressed people in need of freedom.
Remi Kanazi
#17. Resistance! Resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance!
Henry Highland Garnet
#18. The greatest joy of the oppressed people, is enjoying his freedom while,
the greatest misfortune of the oppressors is to suffer for the joy of his people.
Miguel Angel Saez Gutierrez
#19. Can you lead to dignity a man abused by his employer? Can you give hope for a new life to a woman whose infant has died? Can you guide an oppressed people to freedom and power?
Frank Delaney
#20. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#21. The rights of no oppressed people have ever yet been obtained by a voluntary act of justice on the part of the oppressors.
Martin Delany
#22. Our struggle has inspired oppressed people the world over, because if former slaves can make the most powerful nation face itself, there's a chance for everyone else. In a twist, our rage becomes hope for others.
Mychal Denzel Smith
#23. Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.
Bell Hooks
#24. Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.
Stacy Schiff
#25. A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#26. Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#27. The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.
Meridel Le Sueur
#28. In the Bible, God offered the Pharaoh freedom if he would just let the oppressed people free to go to the land of milk and honey. But the Pharaoh disobeyed, and he was destroyed.
Malcolm X
#29. It's not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree. What shall I believe in?
Orhan Pamuk
#30. The oppressed people of Palestine, whether those who dwell in that bloodstained holy land or those who continue to bear the brunt of hardship and displacement worldwide, are all in all the victims of Zionist discrimination and aggression,
Mohammad Khatami
#31. I want to be the voice of the people; black, white, everyday, oppressed people. A person trying to make it and to do it right.
Common
#32. It doesn't do any good to just be on the side of black people. The funnier comedic position is to be on the side of oppressed people in general.
W. Kamau Bell
#33. As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.
Angela Davis
#34. Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it.
Ella Baker
#35. Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one's oppressor.
Florence King
#36. Movements begin when oppressed people make - and keep remaking - a deeply inward decision to stop consenting to external demands that contradict a critical inner truth, the truth that they are worthy of respect.
Parker Palmer
#37. Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#38. Certainly, protecting oppressed people, stopping ethnic conflict and promoting responsible governance are worthy goals. But none is as important for American security and prosperity as keeping the peace in the Middle East, Europe and East Asia.
Michael Mandelbaum
#39. The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba
yes Cuba too.
Malcolm X
#40. Look at the people who are kind of the funniest cultures, they're the cultures of the people who have been the most oppressed, black people and Jews. Not that they're the only funny people, but culturally, it comes from the pain, you know?
Sarah Silverman
#41. God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all - no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.
Ronald J. Sider
#42. President Obama's actions are an unconscionable betrayal of America's fundamental values and a profound insult to the oppressed Cuban people.
Mario Diaz-Balart
#43. At its core, black theology is predicated on the assertion that God has a unique relationship with African Americans. God is not a passive bystander in human history but rather an active participant in the struggles of oppressed and dispossessed people.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
#44. Every single day we sit down to eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and at our table we have food that was planted, picked, or harvested by a farm worker. Why is it that the people who do the most sacred work in our nation are the most oppressed, the most exploited?
Dolores Huerta
#45. Feminists have convinced themselves that any difference between men and women is oppression and that women in the United States are an oppressed minority. This is such a lie. American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth.
Phyllis Schlafly
#46. Everyone who ever did anything revolutionary was just an eighteen-year-old kid once. George Washington, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela ... Social status is just a social construct, the primary function of which is to keep regular people oppressed and rebels in line.
Matthew Quick
#47. Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.
Isaiah
#48. There'll be no more big powers and oppressed poor - only fairness and justice for all, and eternal happiness. So if you're looking for the perfect city and the perfect government in the perfect country with perfect people, just wait a little while longer - it's coming
David Berg
#49. Can satisfy the people, for their object is more righteous than that of the nobles, the latter wishing to oppress, while the former only desire not to be oppressed.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#50. You go overseas and people are oppressed and scared and worried but we're not like that ... we're more like my films and how people come out at the end of seeing them - they feel good.
Yahoo Serious
#51. Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless.
Franz Grillparzer
#52. There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws.
Blaise Pascal
#54. Only mass education, he used to say, would free my people, arguing that an educated man could not be oppressed because he could think for himself.
Nelson Mandela
#55. Till people find themselves greatly abused and oppressed by their governors, they are not apt to complain; and whenever they do, in fact, find themselves thus abused and oppressed, they must be stupid not to complain.
Jonathan Mayhew
#56. Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#57. You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
Margaret Atwood
#58. To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.
John Henrik Clarke
#59. People in the city are poor because they are oppressed, discriminated against and alienated; people in the country are poor because they're too stupid to realize they ought to be living in the city.
Garret Keizer
#60. Regardless of what the law or your teachers have to say about this, you are as human as anyone over the age of 18 or 21, yet, 'minors' are one of the most oppressed groups of people in the world, and certainly the most discriminated against legally.
Grace Llewellyn
#61. A major problem for Black women, and all people of color, when we are challenged to oppose anti-Semitism, is our profound scepticism that white people can actually be oppressed.
Barbara Smith
#62. In metros, girls are very independent, conscious and aware. But in the interiors of our country, where education is not given importance, they continue to be oppressed. But it is important for every woman to acknowledge what she wants from herself rather than going for what people expect from her.
Kangana Ranaut
#63. Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.
Azar Nafisi
#64. No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#65. God is not looking for people who act like Christians. He wants us to be Christians! The word Christian means "anointed or Christlike one." Jesus did not go around "being good"; he went around "doing good" and releasing all who were oppressed. What has he anointed you to do?
Lisa Bevere
#66. In most of Pakistan it is a feudal country. People are very scared and oppressed by authority. But when you move to these wilder areas, they are not so easily suppressed.
Imran Khan
#67. I wrote this book for the Nelson Mandela's of our communities who are willing to stand up for change and people who are oppressed or suppressed from fulfilling their life's purpose
Sahndra Fon Dufe
#68. I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed [to deny others their rights or liberty] by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone.
John Brown
#69. I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed ... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own.
Paul Robeson
#70. When the sage stands above people, they are not oppressed. When he leads people, they are not obstructed. The world will exalt him and not grow tired of him.
Laozi
#71. I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'
Nora Ephron
#72. In 'The Hunger Games,' in most people's idea, in terms of rebellion or a civil-war situation, that would meet the criteria for a necessary war. These people are oppressed, their children are being taken off and put in gladiator games. They're impoverished, they're starving, they're brutalized.
Suzanne Collins
#73. He who becomes a Prince through the favour of the people should always keep on good terms with them; which it is easy for him to do, since all they ask is not to be oppressed
Niccolo Machiavelli
#74. When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless [ ... ] and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people
John Trudell
#75. We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God's divine wrath.
Malcolm X
#76. Some people feel they're being oppressed or held back, even if they have everything they need or everything that a reasonable person could want. Some people always want more.
Rysa Walker
#77. All art stems from a place of alienation. Intimate and alone. Most people are oppressed by the opinion of others, but I was not that way. I was afraid of the repercussions of not doing what I was told to do, what I was called to do by a creator.
CeeLo Green
#78. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
#79. As Christians we have a responsibility toward the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the many innocent people around the world who are caught in wars, natural disasters, and situations beyond their control.
Billy Graham
#80. If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
Malcolm X
#81. When people have been oppressed for so long; they become immune to it.They sometimes see oppression as the alternative means to oppressed others.
Henry Johnson Jr
#82. Money is not the root of all evil ... ignorance is the root of all evil. People do cruel and foolish things for money because they feel oppressed by a sense of lack. If people knew their power to generate wealth, they would never fight or hurt each other over money.
Alan Cohen
#83. I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared, despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves of the cause of the oppressed.
Nelson Mandela
#84. Not only do the oppressed lose nothing when people of conscience boycott institutions that are persistently complicit in the system of oppression; in fact, they gain enormously from the ultimate weakening of this complicity that an effective and sustained boycott leads to.
Omar Barghouti
#85. Black people in America have come from slavery to other forms of being oppressed and there are some things that come with that - some pain and anger that come with that and we as black people have to deal with it to heal that. White people have to understand it and have some compassion toward it.
Common
#86. Some of the best art occurs when people are oppressed. That's just what we do as a species when something shakes us up.
Pharrell Williams
#87. Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.
John Desmond Bernal
#88. With my subjects - the thousands of people I have photographed - I have shared the joy of survival, the courage to resist oppression, the anguish of loss, the resilience of the oppressed, the brutality of the worst of men and the tenderness of the best.
Lynsey Addario
#89. Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.
Simon Wiesenthal
#90. Some people are afraid of generosity. They feel they will be taken advantage of or oppressed. In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.
Ajahn Chah
#91. The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of oppression, if they are strong enough, whether by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.
Ulysses S. Grant
#92. We need more radicalism among us before we can speak as becomes a suffering, oppressed, and persecuted people.
Charles Lenox Remond
#93. Our late Leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with his universal sympathy for all oppressed and his profound understanding of Jesus' revolutionary spirit of love and sacrifice, carried on his revolutionary work for forty years and brought about at last the liberation of the Chinese people.
Chiang Kai-shek
#94. The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved. When
Frederick Douglass
#95. Let's consider a series of lessons that lay the groundwork for our discussion of breaking free. I will list them as nine lessons about captivity and freedom. LESSON 1 The people of God can be oppressed by the enemy.
Beth Moore
#96. No matter how bad things become, they will eventually get better. In the end, the innate desire of all people for truth, justice and human understanding must triumph over ignorance and despair. So if the Chinese oppressed us, it could only strengthen us
Dalai Lama XIV
#97. SJWs... picture themselves as persecuted, oppressed crusaders for peace and equality....These are people who, on a regular basis, call for violence and genocide against "oppressors", whether it's white people, heterosexual people, thin people, or just anyone who even slightly disagrees with them.
Joshua Goldberg
#98. They [homeless people] are constructed ideologically to be oppressed to the level of losing their humanity. It is not by chance it is a design.
Bruno De Oliveira
#99. I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
Malcolm X
#100. 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
