Top 100 Quotes About Oppressive
#1. Christ was crucified by the Jews who had wanted a temporal ruler to rescue them from the oppressive Roman authorities. Instead God sent them a spiritual leader to rescue them from their sins ... He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.
Paul Weyrich
#2. But I would have vengeance to fall on the head, not on the hand; on the tyrannical and oppressive government which designed and directed these premeditated and reiterated insults, not on the tools of office which they employed in the execution of the injuries they designed you.
Walter Scott
#3. The Roman government appeared every day less formidable to its enemies, more odious and oppressive to its subjects.
Edward Gibbon
#4. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?
Pat Robertson
#5. In an oppressive society if a group stands up to take care of the lambs, it automatically stands up against the wolves.
Vishal Mangalwadi
#6. When faced with structural injustice, especially in the form of oppressive military occupations, I have a tendency get a little worked up. So I was interested in learning more about the complicated conflict and decided I would lend some of my time and energy to do so.
Adam Beach
#7. 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
#8. Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.
Margaret Atwood
#9. Until genuine political, economic, and cultural liberty are established, democracy is unlikely to offer anything more than a simulacrum of legitimacy for an oppressive regime.
David Harsanyi
#10. Common culture is in disrepute because many believe our Western tradition has promoted uniquely oppressive and imperialistic attitudes and practices. But it remains the case that no community can exist unless the people in it share important aspects of their lives in common.
George W. Carey
#11. I recall the night that President McKinley died. I was working at the time at a theatre in St. Louis. The oppressive feeling was in the air. I could not make the people laugh.
Al Jolson
#12. 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.
T.F. Hodge
#13. Love without laughter can be grim and oppressive. Laughter without love can be derisive and venomous. Together they make for greatness of spirit.
Robert K. Greenleaf
#14. 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
#15. I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.
Eleanor Catton
#16. Secrets, like tyrants, have influence that extends far beyond their own thrones. To silence their oppressive powers, they must be uncrowned.
Ina Catrinescu
#17. Enjoy what thou has inherited from thy sires if thou wouldn't really possess it. What we employ and use is never an oppressive burden; what the moment brings forth, that only can it profit by.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#18. Empowering beliefs arise from faith and oppressive beliefs arise from fear.
Charles F. Glassman
#19. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past - sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
George Eliot
#20. Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund - doing favors for oppressive regimes, and many others, in exchange for cash.
Donald Trump
#21. The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.
Phyllis Schlafly
#22. 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
#23. Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Camille Paglia
#24. Good historical fiction can bring those sights, smells, and even the oppressive heat so alive, you feel that you are there,
Erin Brown Conroy
#25. Gender is used as a control mechanism that's just wrong. Gender is never anything to struggle with; gender is something to play with. Once you're free of the rules that all these hierarchical, oppressive systems place on gender, that's the tricky part.
Kate Bornstein
#26. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.
Vladimir Nabokov
#27. Poor man! You have many burdens on you: The burdens of your religion, of your culture, of your ignorance, of your oppressive government! Find a wild horse and watch it! You will see what is to be unburdened and free!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#28. Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.
James Madison
#29. 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
#30. A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#32. Immediately upon entering the weighing-in zone, I sensed an oppressive tension in the air, the lightweights staring and glaring at each other, snarling like lean, frenzied dogs. Extreme hunger has a way of creating these emotions in even the most mil-mannered people.
Brad Alan Lewis
#33. It seems that the only gun violence some leftists approve of is gun violence aimed at cops and other groups they see as oppressive or racist.
Gary Bauer
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. The dark was oppressive, unrelieved by any neighbouring buildings or sodium light. It felt primeval,
Jojo Moyes
#38. It is symptomatic of the constricting specialism and the oppressive burden of fact of our time that it has been left to the imagination of a novelist, Marguerite Yourcenar, to create the broadest, the most balanced and in many ways the most authentic interpretation of the affair.
Royston Lambert
#39. When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.
Paul Goodman
#40. In a heavy oppressive atmosphere, when the spirits sink too low, the best cordial is to read over all the letters of one's friends.
William Shenstone
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Anywhere in the world, in every oppressive country, time sooner or later comes and libertarian people sing the same song: Goodbye Mr Dictator! This is a universal law, this is a universal song.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#44. An oppressive odor of decay now mingled with the stench of mold and seemed to clutch at the very breath in their lungs.
Kaoru Kurimoto
#45. It is the silence that frightens me so in the evenings and at night ... I can't tell you how oppressive it is never to be able to go outdoors, also I am very afraid that we will be discovered and be shot.
Anne Frank
#46. Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys.
Camille Paglia
#47. The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.
Peter Ustinov
#48. In fact, the family as an institution is both oppressive and protective and, depending on the issue, is experienced sometimes one way, sometimes the other - often in some mix of the two - by most people who live in families.
Lillian B. Rubin
#49. In my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
Vladimir Nabokov
#50. Muslims have been subjected to so many tyrants and oppressive regimes. That's what the Arab Spring was about, but the problem comes in trying to direct a revolution.
Cat Stevens
#51. T nightfall, at
the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose
out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred
the certainty of death in the depths of one's soul.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#52. Keeping people neurotic and depressed and ignorant and self-doubting is oppressive.
Susie Bright
#53. My life of sin among people I'm sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool.
Thomm Quackenbush
#54. When I see the migrant workers broken bodies and eyes without hope, I want to embrace and wipe away their fears. It makes me angry and helps me to keep fighting the oppressive system.
Irene Fernandez
#55. 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
#56. The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.
Gail Collins
#57. Not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.
Tom Robbins
#58. The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.
Henry Hazlitt
#59. Everything that we've been through makes me realize that love is about finding the right person in this cold, oppressive world that loves all the wrong things about you. Everything you try to hide, they accept. And I know he accepts me.
Calia Read
#60. Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.
Bell Hooks
#61. 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
#62. To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it. To love as God loves us
in freedom and with no strings attached
is a way to grant others a liberating gift.
Mark Galli
#63. Today's liberals wish to disarm us so they can run their evil and oppressive agenda on us. The fight against crime is just a convenient excuse to further their agenda. I don't know about you, but if you hear that Williams' guns have been taken, you'll know Williams is dead.
Walter E. Williams
#64. Happiness, I think, lies on the surface ... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels.
Lewis Mumford
#65. Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said "thou shalt not," and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code.
Bertrand Russell
#66. We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.
David Mamet
#67. But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.
Franz Kafka
#68. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Toni Morrison
#69. People are naturally born as Libertarians till governments and oppressive societies force them to adopt their ideologies and their ways.
Hany Ghoraba
#70. If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work
Jeff Chain
#71. The politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of. It's important to take a lesson from the days of Richard Nixon, when people stood up under a very oppressive president with a very oppressive Supreme Court.
Jill Stein
#72. It was a sweet view-sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.
Jane Austen
#73. The ability of Americans to toss off oppressive characters is the most rewarding aspect, to me, of U.S. history.
Norman Corwin
#74. If people with the very best intentions carry on prosecutions that are oppressive, the end may not always perhaps sanctify the means.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#75. There are always two kinds of people in every country: Progressives and reactionaries; wise people and ignorant; democrats and fascists; libertarians and oppressive. All struggles happen between these two parties. If you are in the first group, your greatest reward will be dignity and victory!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#76. 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
#77. If you live in an oppressive society, you've got to be resilient. You can't let each little thing crush you. You have take every encounter and make yourself larger, rather than allow yourself to be diminished by it.
James Earl Jones
#78. To me, when you're at a hotel and your home environment is ultimately dictated by somebody else, I always find that a little bit oppressive and scary in a way.
Matt Bomer
#79. I look for the humanity in people, however big the politics or oppressive the situation may be, whether it's subsumed within a human being or between two human beings. I want to help us hold a mirror to ourselves.
Mira Nair
#80. In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.
L. Ron Hubbard
#81. Every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.
Auberon Herbert
#82. When a system of oppression has become institutionalized it is unnecessary for individuals to be oppressive.
Florynce Kennedy
#83. A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#84. 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
#85. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
H.P. Lovecraft
#86. 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
#87. Oppressed people are frequently very oppressive when first liberated. They know but two positions: somebody's foot on their neck or their foot on somebody's neck.
Florynce Kennedy
#88. I bring good tidings to our beloved Prophet Muhammad: Allah's promise and the Prophet's prophecy of our victory in Palestine over the Jews and over the oppressive Zionists has begun to come true.
Khaled Mashal
#89. P33- Oppression is domesticating. Gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.
Paulo Freire
#90. Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
Walter Kaufmann
#91. To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.
Tariq Ali
#92. The knowledge that someone was trying his best to kill you was overwhelmingly oppressive,
Ken Follett
#93. Wahhabism goes and takes elements from the Islamic tradition that are most oppressive of women, and highlights and enlarges them and makes them the whole of Islam. In my view, that's a clear corruption of the Islamic tradition.
Khaled Abou El Fadl
#94. In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#95. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge men's consciousness.
Paulo Freire
#96. Oppressive bastards, think they own the place. I told them that karma's going to kick their asses ...
Laurie Halse Anderson
#97. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.
T. E. Hulme
#98. the impression that many seminarians seem to take from their introductory Bible course, that a given text is a puzzle with only one solution - an impression that often makes biblical study oppressive rather than exhilarating.
Ellen F. Davis
#99. October had tremendous possibility. The summer's oppressive heat was a distant memory, and the golden leaves promised a world full of beautiful adventures. They made me believe in miracles.
Sarah Guillory
#100. Disease, which had reduced the number to less than fifty persons, subsided; the oppressive heat lessened; and Indian crops of peas, corn, and beans began to mature.
Charles E. Hatch
