Oppressive Power Quotes

#1. My office has been one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the state.

Jim Garrison

#2. The greatest political problem facing the world today is ... how to curb the oppressive power of government, how to keep it within reasonable bounds.

Leonard Read

#3. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Derrick Jensen

#4. The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George ... Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security.

Ron Paul

#5. The battle for public support for the wars was played out through a combination of the liberal 'feminist' discourse of rights and the hawkish premise that only carpet-bombing the oppressive enemy could solve the problem.

Nina Power

#6. Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

David Sedaris

#7. Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced.

Ken Follett

#8. The little man gave the big one a look. One of his eyes was green, one was black, and both were cool.

George R R Martin

#9. With a happy chirp, hope found a perch in her soul.

Melissa Pearl

#10. We began to look at "Why is that?" And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don't know how to tell them apart. They don't know how to keep track of them.

Sheena Iyengar

#11. 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?

Ken Follett

#12. Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#13. When someone walks into my room and goes 'wow' at my record collection, at that moment I could actually hate music and just want to go sit in the garden.

Erol Alkan

#14. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

Marcel Proust

#15. As the endlessly patient husband explained of his volatile wife's outbursts some years later: "If you knew how little harm it does me, and how much good it does her, you wouldn't wonder that I am meek.

Harold Holzer

#16. When all government ... in little as in great things ... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

Thomas Jefferson

#17. I'd learned a long time ago that you can't prove a negative. You can prove that you did something, but it's the devil to prove you didn't do something.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#18. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

Jonathan Franzen

#19. August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame. That, coupled with the oppressive heat and humidity of my native Washington, D.C., only seemed to heighten the misery.

Henry Rollins

#20. There's a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority.

Robert Bly

#21. Reading is a beautiful paradise.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#22. Ohne Phosphor, Kein Gedanke. Without phosphorus there would be no thoughts.

Ludwig Buchner

#23. The power of collecting money from the people is not to be rejected because it has sometimes been oppressive. Public credit is as necessary for the prosperity of a nation as private credit is for the support and wealth of a family.

Oliver Ellsworth

#24. It is much easier to condemn Islam and 'oppressive Muslim men' than to unpack the intricate relationships between global politics related to empire building and capitalist expansion as well as regional and national struggles revolving around political and economic power and resources.

Nadje Al-Ali

#25. At the end of the day, you have a job to do, and if you don't do your job, you're going to get fired. You just have to kind of put your head down and do it.

Chris Pine

#26. Neil Young sang, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." I say it's better to burn slow and see your grandkids.

Austin Kleon

#27. I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.

Daniel Clowes

#28. The commands of God are given, not to rob me of joy, but lead me into the fullness of joy.

Matt Chandler

#29. To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness that made the regime's power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state.

Orlando Figes

#30. Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong.

Gerry Spence

#31. I was making crappy beats since I was, like, 17 or 18, using Florida rappers, where I'm from. Then I started DJ'ing because I just wanted to have a new job.

Diplo

#32. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.

Noah Webster

#33. There is a sweetness to life that can only be tasted when our eyes are truly open to our purpose and calling. The taste becomes richer still when we surrender to it.

DeAnna Kinney

#34. Syldor was not a land of oppressive rules, roles, and labels. Here, love and power were open to, for, and between all; woman or man, rich or poor. What mattered was the sharpness of your mind, the speed of your blade, and the heat of your touch.

Natalia Marx

#35. Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Roland Barthes