Oppression Power Quotes

#1. No human difference matters much until it becomes a privilege, until it becomes the basis for oppression. Power is the vector that turns minor into major.

Michael Ignatieff

#2. A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression.

Edward Gibbon

#3. The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

Edmund Burke

#4. As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.

Thomas Sowell

#5. Let no man dare, when I am dead. to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country's liberty and independence, or that I could have become the pliant minion of power in the oppression or the miseries of my countrymen.

Robert Emmet

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

Wally Lamb

#7. The act of claiming an identity can be transformational. It can provide healing and empowerment. It can weld solidarity within a community. And, perhaps most importantly, it can diminish power from an oppressor, a dominant group.

Simon Tam

#8. It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles - the oppression of tyranny - to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

Abraham Lincoln

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power.

Steven Erikson

#12. Artists and celebrities are citizens, and as such you have a responsibility to keep fighting for justice because there are monolithic power structures and systemic oppression out there.

Emily Saliers

#13. In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

Adrienne Rich

#14. Anything that you are achieving that undermines and threatens systems of power will meet with oppression. Systems of power don't say 'thank you.' What's important is not to focus all your efforts on the oppression, but to continue the constructive work.

Noam Chomsky

#15. Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression
how long before the pot boiled over.

Chris Abani

#16. 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

#17. A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power.

Leopold Kohr

#18. Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.

Madeleine L'Engle

#19. If you have problems in your life, take the Word and delve deep into it. It will show you what to do and will help you get free of problems and oppression, because the Word of God is quick and powerful.

Sunday Adelaja

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

Derrick A. Bell

#21. Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.

Alan Moore

#22. It is easy to conceive that, according to the power of the legislator, it destroys for its own profit, and in different degrees, amongst the rest of the community, personal independence by slavery, liberty by oppression, and property by plunder. It

Frederic Bastiat

#23. Oppression breeds the power to oppose it.

Andrew Solomon

#24. When you have increasing power of religious groups, oppression of women increases. Women are oppressed in all religions.

Nawal El Saadawi

#25. We are at war with violent extremism. We are at war with people who use their religion for purposes of power and oppression.

Hillary Clinton

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

Jocelyn Murray

#27. Oppression is the essence of power.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner

#28. Negative freedom is freedom from - freedom from oppression, whether it's a colonial power or addiction to alcohol oppressing you. You need to be freed from negative freedom. Positive freedom is freedom for, freedom to be. And that's what's routinely ignored today.

Os Guinness

#29. 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

#30. Roosevelt was as much concerned to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was to end slavery during the Civil War; their priority in policy (whatever their personal compassion for victims of persecution) was not minority rights, but national power.

Howard Zinn

#31. It is a revolution that came to power with its own army and on the ruins of the army of oppression.

Che Guevara

#32. A habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.

Joel Barlow

#33. Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.

Ken Wilber

#34. Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and their families selected for the trust.

Thomas Jefferson

#35. Wealth is attended with power, by which bargains and proceedings, contrary to universal righteousness, are supported; and hence oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul.

John Woolman

#36. In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

Catharine A. MacKinnon

#37. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.

Donald Trump

#38. 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

#39. The only limit to the oppression of government is the power with which the people show themselves capable of opposing it.

Errico Malatesta

#40. Christmas has become a public affirmation of the power and benignity of the state, to which we all make obeisance in the sybolism of the breath test ceremony.

Auberon Waugh

#41. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffered.

William Shakespeare

#42. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism.

Lierre Keith

#43. 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

#44. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.

Nenia Campbell

#45. Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.

Rudolph Rummel

#46. 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

#47. Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.

Immanuel Kant

#48. The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.

Edmund Burke

#49. 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

#50. 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

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

Che Guevara

#52. We humble ourselves under the mighty grace of the Creator. He will deliver us from every chain and oppression.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#53. A true Christian militant attacks systems of oppression and fights for a better world even though that new world might negatively affect their own position of power.

Peter Rollins

#54. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.

Audre Lorde

#55. It is the indispensable duty of those, who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature, and who possess the obligations of Christianity, to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the human race from whatever burden or oppression they may unjustly labor under.

Benjamin Banneker

#56. [T]he powers granted by the proposed Constitution are the gift of the people, and may be resumed by them when perverted to their oppression, and every power not granted thereby remains with the people.

James Madison

#57. Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.

Oliver Tambo

#58. You cannot bring a fresh, new word about human flourishing and expect the old, established systems of oppression and power to stand by passively. Or, as Jesus put it, "You can't put new wine into old wineskins.

Rob Bell

#59. Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression.

Malcolm X

#60. Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.

Alasdair Gray

#61. Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.

Gary Steiner

#62. In an imperialist racist patriarchal society that supports and condones oppression, it is not surprising that men and women judge their worth, their personal power, by their ability to oppress others.

Bell Hooks

#63. We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

Derrick A. Bell

#64. Is it not necessary for each to know for oneself what is the right means of livelihood? If we were avaricious, envious, seeking power, then our means of livelihood will correspond to our inward demands and so produce a world of competition, ruthlessness, oppression, ultimately ending in war.

Jiddu Krishnamurti