Oppression's Quotes

#1. By Oppression's woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us do or die!

Robert Burns

#2. Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

Paul Di Filippo

#3. Morality is the clipping of a bird's wings.

Marty Rubin

#4. In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#5. 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

#6. A lot of authority figures want to be good. I sense that, and yet at the same time I sense that authority, after a while, always leads to some kind of oppression. When the minority report comes in, what you do is run the minority out of town with a flaming cross. It's just the way things are.

Stephen King

#7. Where oppression does not completely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a natural tendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt?

C.S. Lewis

#8. 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

#9. I was in the kitchen drinking coffee when I heard Coretta cry, "Martin, Martin, come quickly!" I put down my cup and ran toward the living room. As I approached the front window Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus: "Darling, it's empty!

Martin Luther King Jr.

#10. [A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.

Noam Chomsky

#11. Iranian women are very consciously aware of gender-explicit oppression. Therefore: with so much more at stake, Iranian women have each other's back: on the street, in stores, at celebrations, everywhere.

Inga Muscio

#12. Beauty can make a woman rich, but if she relies solely on her looks to get by, she'll always remain under a man's thumb.

Ma Jian

#13. 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

#14. It's no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work

Sheryl WuDunn

#15. If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

V.S. Naipaul

#16. I dare anyone to spend 10 years in the laugh-track that is Chuck Lorre's hive of oppression and not suffer some form of an emotional tsunami.

Charlie Sheen

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

Darnell Lamont Walker

#18. The idea is that the woman's heritage and background are just as important as the man's. Many women see taking a man's name as a gesture of symbolic oppression. It's like saying to the woman, 'Who you are as a person isn't as important as who I am.

Rhoda Janzen

#19. Close investigation will show that the primary cause of oppression and injustice, of unrighteousness, irregularity and disorder, is the people's lack of religious faith and the fact that they are uneducated.

Abdu'l- Baha

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. For black folks, the Confederate flag represents the same thing that the Nazi flag represents to the Jews. There is absolutely no difference when we look at it. Now, white folks try to explain it away like, 'Oh, it's OK.' But when you're black, it is not OK. It represents oppression and murder.

Ken Page

#23. 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

#24. Feminist politics is losing momentum because feminist movement has lost clear definitions. We have those definitions. Let's reclaim them. We can share the simple yet powerful message that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression.

Bell Hooks

#25. President Bush was disgusted by the Assad regime's oppression of the Syrian people as well as its support for terrorism, interference in Lebanon, and encouragement of jihadist attacks on Americans in Iraq.

Elliott Abrams

#26. The danger of oppression is not just being oppressed, it's becoming an oppressor,

Jon Stewart

#27. According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we.

Leonard Peltier

#28. I like to be able to raise people's consciousness, yes. And to remind that those of us involved in the receiving end of the oppression, we have a duty.

Wes Studi

#29. Rastafarianism and reggae music have always kind of resonated with me. Those ideas of redemption, liberation and overcoming oppression through music, weed and community. Fighting evil through love and music, I think it's just a really powerful idea.

Conor Oberst

#30. Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Aldous Huxley

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine's correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.

Ludwig Von Mises

#34. I say violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie. Americans taught the black people to be violent. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression if necessary. We will be free, by any means necessary.

H. Rap Brown

#35. The Empire pretends it's about law and order, but at the end of the day, it's about dressing up oppression in the costume of justice. The

Chuck Wendig

#36. 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

#37. The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Ilana Mercer

#38. People who have never been hunted always seem to think there's a reason for it. 'They wouldn't do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.' As if that was how oppression works.

Fredrik Backman

#39. Maybe there's less oppression growing up in a small village, and fewer rules, and less danger.

Luke Treadaway

#40. I think it's an enormous blessing to be the child of an immigrant who fled oppression, because you realize how fragile liberty is and how easily it can be taken away.

Ted Cruz

#41. Control does not come from strong police forces, does not come from oppression and repression, does not come from violating people's rights or giving the security systems undue powers

Hanan Ashrawi

#42. Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

David Foster Wallace

#43. I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.

Ayn Rand

#44. 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

#45. Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it's able to be pushed and sold because education in this country is so woefully incompetent and inept.

Rush Limbaugh

#46. There is no doubt that Iraqis, like Australians and Americans, love and desire freedom. However, if freedom doesn't mean the right to complete self-determination, unfettered by interests other than one's own, then that freedom is less than worthless - it's oppression.

Amir Butler

#47. Where there is oppression, there would be oppositions. Where there is "Knowledge" there would be progression. Where there is "HATE" evil will always prevail. Where there is forgiveness, there's a better Future. Where there is ignorance, there's a lack of Wisdom. Change is an ongoing process.

Henry Johnson Jr

#48. See, you don't wanna be a Jew. Too much work--there's a lot of holidays but it's even more work. It's sanctioned oppression, it's God's tyranny.

Shawn Stewart Ruff

#49. I think that any time anybody gets rid of oppression, intervention, exploitation, cruelty - that's positive.

Assata Shakur

#50. While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

Kathleen Hanna

#51. ...if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men's homes.

Roger Casement

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. She's an engineer of oppression, and one of the best minds of Gold. And she tried to kill Sevro. Bad play.

Pierce Brown

#55. 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

#56. The Empire is a thug, a bully. It's no better than Surat Nuat, or Black Sun, or the syndicate of Hutts. The Empire pretends it's about law and order, but at the end of the day, it's about dressing up oppression in the costume of justice.

Chuck Wendig

#57. 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

#58. As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women's oppression, if only through silence.

Allan G. Johnson

#59. I walked and walked, sometimes with an objective- a friend's house, a shop, the church or school- but mostly at random, to outrun oppression.

Jessica Anderson

#60. I can be all pissed off at the oppression of the state, but what does that really mean? Well, it's the tacit consent of a public.

Cecily McMillan

#61. Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns.

Audre Lorde

#62. Those who regarded the revolution, during Imam Khomeini's time, as a deviation, are now [wielding] the tools of terror and oppression

Mohammad Khatami

#63. 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

#64. Shortly after news of Zarqawi's death reached the media, al-Qaeda stated its intention to continue its oppression of the Iraqi people.

Mike Fitzpatrick

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

Criss Jami

#66. And the people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the oppressor, I don't know who is.

Terry Pratchett

#67. They wouldn't do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them." As if that's how oppression works. But

Fredrik Backman

#68. Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather
it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

John F. Kennedy

#69. If you want a definition of what a coward is, it's needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.

Andrea Dworkin

#70. In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own.

Barbara Kingsolver

#71. When female stories are muted, we are teaching our kids that their dignity is second class and the historical accounts of their lives [are] less relevant. This lowered value carries over when women face sexual objectification and systemic brutalization from inside and outside the community.

Aurin Squire

#72. What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.

Camille Paglia

#73. The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Hosea Ballou

#74. Let's be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as we fight oppression.

Dean Spade

#75. The emerging picture is one where slavery, oppression and exploitation of society's most vulnerable members have by no means been consigned to the past.

Juan Somavia

#76. 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

#77. Learning has been liberated from the despotism of the few and is now available to the mass public for one's own evolution. Yet many of us continue to find solace in illusions, in conformity to systematical oppression, in distractions that keep us mentally, socially and often physically retarded.

D. Allen Miller

#78. 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

#79. What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

Audre Lorde

#80. Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

Wanda Sykes

#81. ...oppression is really quite simple. It's about looting.

Aurora Levins Morales

#82. 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

#83. Shakespeare shows you what it is possible to do in English as a writer - but also shows you that you might as well give up. As it's all been done before and hundreds of years ago. So I have had that long-standing relationship of oppression and inspiration.

Chris Adrian

#84. Now I understand why women want to have children - it's simply the urge to create happiness for yourself, somehow to fill the oppressive, unbearable emptiness in your soul.

Nina Lugovskaya

#85. So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man's deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.

Emma Goldman

#86. The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women's oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.

Robin Morgan

#87. 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

#88. My lady, don't you think you might be over-extending yourself? You've decided to confront the gyorn, liberate the court women from masculine oppression, save Arelon's economy, and feed Elantris. Perhaps you should just let this man's subterfuge go unexplored.

Brandon Sanderson

#89. Mainly, it's not that there are things you can't say. It's that there are things you can't say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

Oliver Burkeman

#90. Some live for their own joy and pleasure.
Some live to ease the burdens of others.
Then there are those who seem to exist for pain's sake only, that in the end the wrathful fire sent to consume their oppressors will be justified."

~ In loving memory of Miss Annabelle Fancher

Richelle E. Goodrich

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

Philippa Gregory

#92. Often we blame a region's religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it's also true that ... it is often cited by the oppressors.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#93. These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what's of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will.

Clara Bingham

#94. 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

#95. The "Otherizing" of women is the oldest oppression known to our species, and it's the model, the template, for all other oppressions.

Robin Morgan

#96. Half a world away nations that once lived under oppression and tyranny are now budding democracies due in large part to America 's leadership and the sacrifices of our military.

Bob Riley

#97. There were many groups working for women's rights, but none of them dealt with the root cause of women's oppression-religion.

Anne Nicol Gaylor

#98. I believe certain members of the U.S. Congress have aided in the oppression and diversion of critical information that could have revealed a fullness of truth long ago.

Bo Gritz

#99. Until men learn to celebrate and operate on the feminine aspect of themselves and stop the oppression of women, children, the environment, other species, we don't have a world to live in. It's not a world that anyone chooses to live in.

James Cromwell

#100. Cubans understand that theirs is a country that provides sanctuary for people fleeing oppression. As a nation, they are very proud of this stance. They don't care how much the U.S. government badgers or attacks them.

Assata Shakur