Top 100 Quotes About Oppression
#1. We have learned that change cannot come through war. War is not a feasible tool to use in fighting against the oppression we face. War has caused more problems. We cannot embrace that path.
Rigoberta Menchu
#2. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It, London: Pluto Press, 1973.
Philippa Gregory
#3. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology ('Just do it!') to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression. It
Yuval Noah Harari
#4. 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
#5. If Saddam Hussein committed crimes such as political oppression against the Iraqi people, it should be resolved legally in a fair and just manner which doesn't paint a sense of injustice
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
#6. 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
#7. Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.
Alva Myrdal
#8. While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal
the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have
nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined,
is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.
Horace Greeley
#9. We will not forget that Liberty has made her home here, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected ... A stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and mans oppression until Liberty enlightens the world.
Grover Cleveland
#10. In poor environment, I find great inspiration. Many of the men and women whom I admire as artists, the things they write, the songs they sing, the admission is filled with inspired moments to overcome oppression.
Harry Belafonte
#11. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
Bell Hooks
#12. Liberals are so committed to a narrative of oppression and exploitation that they can't take good news, they can't accept good news.
Jonathan Haidt
#13. Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
#14. Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
Simone De Beauvoir
#15. If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law; and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression.
Thomas Paine
#16. The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.
Tariq Ali
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Sometimes, in periods of oppression and mass insanity, the most decisive form of resistance is simply the decision to not engage.
Lauren Oliver
#21. 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
#22. That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression.
Ezra Taft Benson
#23. Literacy is inseparable from opportunity, and opportunity is inseperable from freedom. The freedom promised by literacy is both freedom from - from ignorance, oppression, poverty - and freedom to - to do new things, to make choices, to learn.
Koichiro Matsuura
#24. 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
#25. Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.
Edmund Burke
#27. Kill me if you will, I am not afraid to die; and I have endured so much oppression that I am weary of life. But I am a strong man, and I could cast both of you down, if I would. If you have any legal process to serve, present it, for I am at all times subject to law and shall not offer resistance.
Sam Smith
#28. Christian soldiers armed with virtue- hearts afire with blind obsession, cannot see the difference 'twixt compassion and oppression
Lucretia Mott
#29. For the Order wishes to be secret and to work in silence; for thus it is better secured from the oppression of the ruling powers, and because this secrecy gives a greater zest to the whole.
Adam Weishaupt
#30. Remember: Oppression thrives off isolation. Connection is the only thing that can save us.
Yolo Akili
#31. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Tom Standage
#32. Political scientists and professors are the new clergy; the clergy of oppression.
A.E. Samaan
#33. Oh, father!" he said, "how the fear and oppression of ages are gone like a cloud swallowed up of space. Oh, father! are not all human ills doomed thus to vanish at last in the eternal fire of the love-burning God? - An
George MacDonald
#34. We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.
Confucius
#35. It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice.
Herbert Hoover
#36. To give a thing to one who is not fit for it and not to give a thing to one who is fit for it is equally oppression.
Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali
#37. I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.
Sidney Poitier
#38. In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.
Anthony Bourdain
#39. Philip Martin has written a wise, compassionate, and nurturing guide through the self-oppression of depression.
Harold H. Bloomfield
#40. It was a huge obsession taking over my life, every injustice leading logically to a related and worse injustice until I was standing in the center of a pulsating ring of pain and torture and oppression and the only real solution was to just kill yourself. Just get off the fucking fucked-up planet.
Michelle Tea
#41. We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood ... We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.
Ismail Haniyeh
#42. When we place ourselves in a position of judgment, then we turn ourselves into oppressors. Healthy self-esteem cannot exist side-by-side with oppression of any kind.
Julia A. Boyd
#43. There is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense.
Michael Albert
#45. It is evil things that we will be fighting against-brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution-and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
Neville Chamberlain
#46. There were few worse criminals on any world than the engineer who blithely and knowingly hands over to a tyrant the tools of oppression.
David Brin
#47. As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#48. When a person in a Russian prison decides to start speaking, to start speaking the truth - they start to reject oppression.
Maria Alyokhina
#49. I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.
Theodore Bikel
#50. 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
#51. The revolt against any oppression usually goes to an opposite extreme for a time; and that is right and necessary.
Tennessee Celeste Claflin
#52. Striking a balance in life is tough, but trying to strike balance and remain fair in the face of imbalance and oppression is even tougher.
Aisha Mirza
#53. Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.
William Penn
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#57. 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
#58. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.
Edmund Burke
#60. A centre of racism is a point of pain, a point of no justice and a house of oppression.
Auliq Ice
#61. I think violence is part of the struggle against oppression. If something bad happens to these people [animal researchers], it will discourage others. It is inevitable that violence will be used in the struggle and that it will be effective.
Jerry Vlasak
#62. No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.
Joseph Addison
#63. My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Vladimir Nabokov
#64. If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make himself richer and others poorer by the violent oppression and spoliation of his fellow men.
Ludwig Von Mises
#65. Sometimes films about oppression or suppression can be quite maudlin and quite dour. Sometimes you need a little sugar with the medicine and I think of myself as the little sugar.
Chris O'Dowd
#67. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Karl Marx
#69. I'm sorry Brooke. I didn't know that when I thought I was eating a fried chicken sandwich, I was really eating bigotry and oppression.
Gisele Walko
#70. Black men and women who refuse to live under oppression are dangerous to white society because they become symbols of hope to their brothers and sisters, inspiring them to follow their example.
Huey Newton
#71. There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#72. Pride in what and who you are is a strong foundation, but don't be defined by your oppression; use your anger, don't let it use you.
Dave McKean
#73. Because some people have sex with people of the same sex, an entire culture has been created, broadly speaking, out of oppression. Which in a rational world would not be an issue.
Neil Tennant
#74. He was not the Empire - not every moment of oppression and indignity and torment she had ever suffered. He was an Imperial, a petty, spiteful, scared little man who'd forgotten his own atrocities.
Alexander Freed
#75. It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.
Harry Oppenheimer
#76. As much as the world has an instinct for evil and is a breeding ground for genocide, holocaust, slavery, racism, war, oppression, and injustice, the world has an even greateer instinct for goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love.
Desmond Tutu
#77. We are a conspiracy of hope and we are pressing back against the strong tide of oppression which for centuries has been the legacy of those of us who are labelled with mental illness. We are refusing to reduce human beings to illnesses.
Patricia Deegan
#78. When a nation is under oppression for too long, it gets used to it and begins to agree with that oppression
Sunday Adelaja
#79. One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
Thomas Sowell
#80. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.
George Haven Putnam
#81. 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
#82. The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.
Nawal El Saadawi
#83. What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
Audre Lorde
#84. Impression, not oppression determines the real life of a real person.
Israelmore Ayivor
#85. Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.
Salman Rushdie
#86. Human rights are particularly cherished by the West, which has never acknowledged economic rights. Human rights mean freedom from politcal oppression, tyranny and abuse, while economic oppression, tyranny and abuse are built into the very structures of globalization.
Jeremy Seabrook
#87. The present Arab uprising didn't stem from Israel. The old guard is trying to keep down the young chickens. The old guard is better organized. They may win elections, but unless they have a solution to poverty, to corruption, to oppression, they will not last. I am with the young people.
Shimon Peres
#88. An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.
Eugene Ionesco
#89. Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.
Rita Dove
#90. Women prefer to serve the present and are afraid of age; they are in the grip of youth of their dreams. Age is truly an oppression for women.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#91. 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
#92. The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.
William Murray, 1st Earl Of Mansfield
#93. Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
Bertolt Brecht
#94. With all your music, loud and lustily, With every dainty joy of sight and smell, Prepare a banquet meet to entertain The Lord of Thunder, that hath set you free From old oppression.
Hartley Coleridge
#95. To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.
James Madison
#96. I said to Augustus, "Observation: Standing in line is a form of oppression," and he said, "Seriously.
John Green
#97. The God of the Bible is the God of liberation rather than oppression; a God of justice rather than injustice; a God of freedom and humanity rather than enslavement and subservience; a God of love, righteousness and community rather than hatred, self-interest and exploitation.
Allan Boesak
#98. For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.
Monique Wittig
#99. Precious is sleep, better to be of stone,
while the oppression and the shame still last;
not seeing and not hearing, I am blest;
so do not wake me, hush! keep your voice down.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#100. What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.
Simone Weil
