Top 100 Quotes About Oppressed
#1. Helping others
I order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Moslem or not.
Idries Shah
#2. The nations which have received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered, and the nations that have tortured and oppressed him have written out their own curse.
Olive Schreiner
#3. Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
Malcolm X
#4. It takes a lot of work to keep someone oppressed and it takes a heroic effort to get out of such an oppression!
Danita Smith
#5. I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.
Wilkie Collins
#6. We do not need to explain how the Aryans entered and settled in the Dravidian country, and subjugated and oppressed the Dravidians. Nor do we need to explain how before the Aryans entered the Dravidian country, the Dravidian country had a civilization and arts of the highest rank.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#7. We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body.
William Shakespeare
#8. True religion always moves us to serve others and to give our lives to see those oppressed find freedom.
Erwin McManus
#9. Waiting for salvation, his faith transcends the dread of the moment; the desires of the oppressed will be sharpened by the courage to be and the will to live.20
Samuel Terrien
#10. Sleep, Silence's child, sweet father of soft rest, Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings Indifferent host to shepherds and kings Sole comforter to minds with grief oppressed.
William Drummond
#11. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.
Anonymous
#12. Education is suffering from narration sickness.
Paulo Freire
#13. The more we are oppressed by the cross, the fuller will be our spiritual joy.
John Calvin
#14. When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world
Dean Koontz
#15. No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.
Marcus Garvey
#16. What should move us to action is human dignity: the inalienable dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each of us. We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.
Dominique De Menil
#17. 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
#18. Our task is not to liberate the oppressed, but to liberate the oppressors
Nelson Mandela
#19. You have discovered so much kindness and good will to those you thought were oppressed, and had no helper, that I am sure you will not despise what I have wrote, if you judge it will be of any service to them.
Jupiter Hammon
#20. Clothed in facts truth feels oppressed. In the garb of poetry it moves easy and free.
Rabindranath Tagore
#21. The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.
Dahr Jamail
#22. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human;
Patrick O'Brian
#23. 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
#24. Politicians are always saying that they are in support of Iraqi citizens and now they are increasing the price of petrol. We were oppressed for 35 years. We are like a sick patient who is in need of care, and they are increasing prices
Muhammad Ali
#25. Robin Wood notes that 'When we have worked our way through all the other liberation movements, we may discover that children are the most oppressed section of the population' (1979a: 10),
Murray J.D. Leeder
#26. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.
Desmond Tutu
#27. 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
#28. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#29. A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
Barbara Deming
#30. Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body.
Martin Luther
#31. The oppressed always learned from and copied the oppressor. When the tables were turned, the stage was set for another round of revenge and violence
roles reversed. And reversed and reversed ad nauseam.
Frank Herbert
#32. In the history of humanity, women have never been as oppressed as they are right now. Men can make babies with us and then walk away.
Laura Schlessinger
#33. This is called 'the land of the free and the home of the brave'; it is called the 'asylum of the oppressed,' and some have been foolish enough to call it the 'Cradle of Liberty.' If it is the 'Cradle of Liberty,' they have rocked the child to death.
William Wells Brown
#34. Non Violence and Religion:
Both designed to keep the oppressed from murdering their oppressors.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#35. 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
#36. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both
Paulo Freire
#37. My anxious recollections, my sympathetic feeling, and my best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever, in any country, I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.
George Washington
#38. I am willing to admit that if the agriculturists are oppressed by peculiar burdens, they ought to be relieved from them, or be allowed a fair and just protection equivalent to all such peculiar burdens.
Joseph Hume
#39. When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.
S. Ansky
#40. The movies that I did in the '80s were either good or bad, but I never was oppressed with any feeling - I mean, I thought it was ridiculous to play high school or college students when I was 30. But at the same time, that was really done then.
Curtis Armstrong
#41. Never elated when someone's oppressed, never dejected when another one's blessed.
Alexander Pope
#42. Age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and nowhere, in all the annals of mankind, has any god succored the oppressed
Robert Green Ingersoll
#43. I teach at Eastern University, which is highly committed to doing work among the poor and the oppressed peoples of the world. We have a special commitment to the city.
Tony Campolo
#44. In order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image onto history.
Sheila Rowbotham
#45. I have spent all my life advocating on behalf of the poor, oppressed and marginalized. As a social justice and human rights activist, and now as President of the Republic of Malawi, I have a deep appreciation for the challenges of those on the margins of society.
Joyce Banda
#46. The wicked cry out,
"We are oppressed!"
when the law is set out.
The righteous rejoice,
"We are blessed!"
when a king serves God
according to His law.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#47. 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
#48. The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire, with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities, which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.
Edward Gibbon
#49. P29 - the oppressed, having internalised the image of the oppressor and adopted his guideline are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.
Paulo Freire
#51. We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.
Jean Vanier
#52. 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
#53. It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as subjects of the transformation.
Paulo Freire
#54. What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#55. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade
Paulo Freire
#56. When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#57. The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Steve Biko
#58. The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.
Carl Sagan
#59. 17You, LORD, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, 18defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.
Anonymous
#60. The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!
Augusto Boal
#61. A society is only as free as its most oppressed and afflicted members.
Silvia Tennenbaum
#62. Thus my learning is not my own; it belongs to the unlearned and is the debt I owe themMy wisdom belongs to the foolish, my power to the oppressed. Thus my wealth belongs to the poor, my righteousness to the sinners.
Martin Luther
#63. The only thing worse than an oppressed liberal is the Rino Republican who sympathizes with them.
Josh Bernstein
#64. It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a radical conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.
Malcolm X
#65. The oppressed, subaltern, therefore, cannot speak through another and cannot articulate on their own.]
Anonymous
#66. 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
#67. Being brought up in a Christian home and still identifying as Christian, I get pretty annoyed with the Christian lobbies around the world who say gay marriage destroys the family and all that kind of rubbish. They claim to follow someone who always stood up for the oppressed and marginalised.
David Pocock
#68. Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed
Paulo Freire
#69. The oppressed do not see too much difference between those who would keep them down and those who do nothing to help. There is no in-between.
Christine Caine
#70. P46- As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically "accept" their exploitation.
Paulo Freire
#71. Assist your Muslim brother, whether he be an oppressor or oppressed. "Bu how shall we doit when he is an oppressor?" enquired a companion. Muhammad replied, "Assisting an oppressor by forbidding and witholding him from oppression.
Anonymous
#72. Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#73. Loving confrontation can free both the oppressed from docility and the oppressor from sin.
Walter Wink
#74. May he at the last bind us to his triumphal carriage so that, although in bonds oppressed, we may participate in his victory!
Eric Metaxas
#75. 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
#76. The eternal destiny of human beings will be measured by how much or how little solidarity we have displayed with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, and the oppressed. In the end we will be judged in terms of love.
Leonardo Boff
#77. 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
#78. Resilience is a systematic adaptation of the oppressed self under the arbitrary imposition of the political order. Emancipation is the liberation of the self from the oppressive imposition of the political order upon the self.
Bruno De Oliveira
#79. If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?
David Horowitz
#80. 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
#81. Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blessed, beneath thy contemplation sink heart and voice oppressed.
John Mason Neale
#82. As is often the case, an individual who has been racially oppressed may be blind that the same mechanisms of exclusion and denigration are at work in gender oppression.
Chantal Zabus
#83. Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.
Bell Hooks
#84. 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
#85. If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation.
Simone De Beauvoir
#86. An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.
Toni Cade Bambara
#87. 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
#88. Let us remind ourselves that our work is far from complete. Where there is poverty and sickness, including AIDS, where human beings are being oppressed, there is more work to be done. Our work is for freedom for all ...
Nelson Mandela
#89. P40- for the oppressors..to 'be' is to have and to be the class of the "haves".
Paulo Freire
#90. Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country?
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#91. The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.
Bell Hooks
#92. Be courageous. Always be a voice for those who are oppressed.
Debasish Mridha
#93. 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
#94. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
Eric Hoffer
#95. Naming oppressive realities, in and of itself, has not brought about the kinds of changes for oppressed groups that it can for more privileged groups, who command a different quality of attention.
Bell Hooks
#96. Oppressed cultures often envy those which are not, or oppressed individuals do, and sometimes those which - and who - are not envy those which - who - are.
Gerald Stern
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. P26 - Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.
Paulo Freire
#100. Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
Karl Marx