Quotes About Oppression

#1. 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. - Author: Sheila Jeffreys

#2. 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. - Author: Inga Muscio

#3. Hatred of oppression seems to me so blended with hatred of the oppressor that I cannot separate them. I feel that no other injury could be so hard to bear, so very very hard to forgive, as that inflicted by cruel oppression and prejudice. - Author: Charlotte Forten Grimke

#4. [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. - Author: Noam Chomsky

#5. No woman should ever lie about another woman. You've violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression? - Author: John Green

#6. Why should I ever resist any delay or disapointment, any affliction or oppression or humiliation - when I know God will use it in my life to make me like Jesus and to prepare me for heaven? - Author: Kay Arthur

#7. Other unsolved murders or untimely deaths were readily blamed on the supposedly sinister Jews: If a Jewish doctor failed to save a life, the whole Jewish community might be attacked and fined. - Author: Robert Winder

#8. As there is oppression of the majority such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred. - Author: Bram Fischer

#9. Under the oppression of the devil, we will eventually reject structure and accountability. - Author: Steven B. Curington

#10. Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission. - Author: Simone Weil

#11. Earth and air, fire and water, the stars in their courses, the high tide of destiny and the Will of divine Providence are all arrayed against the forces of oppression. -- Louis Gregory - Author: Janet Ruhe-Schoen

#12. But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression - Author: John Locke

#13. 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! - Author: Martin Luther King Jr.

#14. 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. - Author: Ma Jian

#15. We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure. - Author: Shirin Ebadi

#16. Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression. - Author: Laurie Penny

#17. Groucho Marx shot back angrily, "The Sandy McPhersons and Yonny Yohnsons were not a minority being subjected to oppression, restriction, segregation or persecution. - Author: Kliph Nesteroff

#18. Instead of friends, I see in Washington only mortal enemies. Instead of loving the old flag of the stars and stripes, I see in it only the symbol of murder, plunder, oppression, and shame. - Author: Rose O'Neal Greenhow

#19. Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past. - Author: Roland Barthes

#20. The paramount duty of maintaining public order and defending the interests of our own people may require the adoption of measures of restriction, but they should not tolerate the oppression of individuals of a special race. - Author: Grover Cleveland

#21. Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work. - Author: Frederick Douglass

#22. I hold that in every situation of injustice and oppression, the Christian
who cannot deal with it by violence
must make himself completely a part of it as representative of the victims. - Author: Jacques Ellul

#23. Anger - justifiable anger in the face of oppression and prejudice - should not be mistaken for hatred. - Author: Christina Engela

#24. To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals. - Author: Brigid Brophy

#25. You don't know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don't know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty! - Author: Gustav Landauer

#26. In no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments. - Author: Jeremy Bentham

#27. Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed. - Author: Robert Kennedy

#28. The only marches I have ever witnessed under a banner of so-called "Christianity" have been to enforce oppression and incite hatred and intolerance - and to deprive people of their equal civil rights. - Author: Christina Engela

#29. A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. - Author: Andrea Dworkin

#30. As a human being, I will always feel that where there is oppression, I am with the underdog. - Author: Hany Abu-Assad

#31. 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 - Author: Paulo Freire

#32. Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom. - Author: Nelson Mandela

#33. Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license. - Author: Leo Strauss

#34. At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes. - Author: Jimmy Carter

#35. Our invisibility is the essence of our oppression. And until we eliminate that invisibility, people are going to be able to perpetuate the lies and myths about gay people. - Author: Jean O'Leary

#36. Oppression has no logic
just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system. - Author: Gloria Steinem

#37. If we know one thing from experience it is that oppression does not crush rebellion, no matter how it tries,' I told him. 'It breeds it anew with every tyrannical act. - Author: Isobelle Carmody

#38. All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another. - Author: Samuel Adams

#39. Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale. - Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#40. If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. - Author: V.S. Naipaul

#41. But whether the resistance against government tyrants is non-violent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism. - Author: Ron Paul

#42. Half the Sky: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide - Author: Gary Haugen

#43. 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 - Author: Sheryl WuDunn

#44. The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice. - Author: Robert H. Jackson

#45. 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. - Author: Angie Thomas

#46. He who allows oppression shares the crime. - Author: Erasmus

#47. A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. ... I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction. - Author: William Powell

#48. This is a moral universe, which means that despite all the evidence that seems to be to the contrary, there is no way that evil and injustice and oppression and lies can have the last word ... that is what has upheld the morale of our people, to know that in the end good will prevail. - Author: Desmond Tutu

#49. Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators. - Author: Andrew Solomon

#50. P20 - The rightist sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women. - Author: Paulo Freire

#51. To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering. - Author: Charles Dickens

#52. Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression. - Author: Rutherford B. Hayes

#53. [H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign? - Author: Nick Hornby

#54. 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. - Author: Garth Risk Hallberg

#55. 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. - Author: Catharine A. MacKinnon

#56. Opting for peace does not mean a passive acquiescence to evil or compromise of principle. It demands an active struggle against hatred, oppression and disunity, but not by using methods of violence. Building peace requires creative and courageous action - Author: Pope John Paul II

#57. Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all. - Author: Charles Colson

#58. Freedom has nothing to do with having the right to vote for your oppressor; freedom is not having any form of oppression. - Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

#59. Never forget that turning a blind eye to oppression and watching from the sidelines is itself opression - Author: Harun Yahya

#60. Let them shoot us in the head,
My blood will grow roots
and will blossom. - Author: Visar Zhiti

#61. It is the fool who is haunted by fears, dread of dangers, oppression of mind, not the wise man. - Author: Gautama Buddha

#62. 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. - Author: John Woolman

#63. Morality is the clipping of a bird's wings. - Author: Marty Rubin

#64. What the world needs is not redemption from sin but redemption from hunger and oppression; it has no need to pin its hopes upon Heaven, it has everything to hope for from this earth. - Author: Friedrich Durrenmatt

#65. 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. - Author: Paul Di Filippo

#66. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you. - Author: George W. Bush

#67. Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies. - Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#68. Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels. - Author: Bell Hooks

#69. Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression. - Author: John Charles Polanyi

#70. In 1559, Duke Frederick III was summoned before the Emperor Ferdinand I at Breslau to answer the accusations of extravagance and oppression brought against him by the Silesian Estates and was deposed, imprisoned, and his son Henry XI given the Ducal crown instead. - Author: Sabine Baring-Gould

#71. Dignity, in private men and in governments, has been little else than a stately and stiff perseverance in oppression; and spirit, as it is called, little else than the foam of hard-mouthed insolence. - Author: Walter Savage Landor

#72. It takes a lot of work to keep someone oppressed and it takes a heroic effort to get out of such an oppression! - Author: Danita Smith

#73. An individual excels where the institution fails. - Author: Joel T. McGrath

#74. We shall all respect the principle of each other and do nothing that would be regarded as an act oppression to any portion of the people - Author: Alexander Mackenzie

#75. He knows that the only way to break the cycle of retribution and oppression and heartbreak is to demolish the ladder of deserving altogether. - Author: Tullian Tchividjian

#76. From joblessness to lack of education and professional skills to sexual and gender-based violence, women face a multi-faceted oppression. - Author: Zainab Salbi

#77. If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American. - Author: Rich Lowry

#78. If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free? - Author: June Jordan

#79. Joy beats oppression. - Author: Jack Terricloth

#80. Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression. - Author: Che Guevara

#81. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy. - Author: Benjamin Franklin

#82. There is just so much hurt, disappointment, and oppression one can take ... The line between reason and madness grows thinner. - Author: Rosa Parks

#83. Somehow, I realized I could write books about black characters who reflected my own experiences or otherworldly experiences - not just stories of history, poverty and oppression. - Author: Tananarive Due

#84. We are taught that these are dualisms: Jewish/Arab, public/private, visible/invisible, Black/white, privilege/oppression, pride/shame. But these are false separations that don't exist. - Author: Daisy Hernandez

#85. 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. - Author: Donald Trump

#86. Where oppression does not completely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a natural tendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt? - Author: C.S. Lewis

#87. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression. - Author: Thomas Paine

#88. In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies. - Author: Nicholas Kristof

#89. We live in a world of wars and wars alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you'll notice one curious fact about them, they all suffer, they all die, and sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most. - Author: Frederick Lenz

#90. Ignore the voice that scorns and ridicules to ensure it does not mold you. Stifling subtleties like these, if unchecked, are oppressive. Freedom is a love supreme birthright, not a privilege to be governed by any other. - Author: T.F. Hodge

#91. I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art. - Author: Francisco Goya

#92. The scripture says "oppression makes it even a wise man mad" ... - Author: Harriet Jacobs

#93. 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. - Author: Stephen King

#94. To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people. - Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

#95. 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. - Author: Ronald J. Sider

#96. Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings. - Author: Margaret Atwood

#97. ABYSS
Our country lives
Among the dead
And dies among the living
Sometimes. - Author: Visar Zhiti

#98. To minimize hatred and oppression, our love roots must be deep and solid. - Author: Auliq Ice

#99. I certainly know about the oppression and prejudices of being black and a woman and from the South. - Author: Clarice Taylor

#100. I am a man of peace, God knows how I love peace; but I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace. - Author: Lajos Kossuth