Quotes About Oppressive

#1. She's a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

Han Kang

#2. I've read the Bible, but I felt like a lot of the Bible was oppressive towards women. Then I read the Quran, and I thought it was also oppressive towards women.

Robert Webb

#3. Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.

Nicholas Kristof

#4. Though Fin couldn't see it, she felt the closeness of land around her. From beyond the grey veil she could sense the oppressive weight of two great continents crowding down to the sea, each to kneel and contemplate the nearness of an ancient earthen brother.

A.S. Peterson

#5. That's the oppressive thing about happiness, the way everything is out on the table like an open book:

Herman Koch

#6. I grew up in a very difficult country, a very oppressive situation because of the Somoza dictatorship. My family was in opposition to Somoza; Somoza was a liberal, and my family were conservatives. These were the two traditional parties in Nicaragua.

Gioconda Belli

#7. Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.

Charlotte Bronte

#8. My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly.

Jean-Dominique Bauby

#9. I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains - or spiritual trial? Once they're over, the world looks quite a different place again.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#10. The ultimate goal of the arriviste's aspirations is not to acquire a thing of value, but to be more highly esteemed than others. He merely uses the "thing" as an indifferent occasion for overcoming the oppressive feeling of inferiority which results from his constant comparisons.

Max Scheler

#11. We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.

James Hillman

#12. Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.

Glenn Greenwald

#13. Miss Lucy's called the bell o' St. Ogg's, they say: that's a cur'ous word,' observed Mr. Pullet, on whom the mysteries of etymology sometimes fell with an oppressive weight.

George Eliot

#14. Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.

John D'Agata

#15. I am a Soviet born American Jew. I was born in and left Soviet Union, while it was and in some cases still is, oppressive and socialist nation. I love America and being an American. I could never understand, why would people willingly give up their freedom!!

Jake Danishevsky

#16. 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

#17. Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

Herbert Spencer

#18. 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

#19. Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.

Taslima Nasrin

#20. Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#21. Some doomsayers think the collapse will be triggered by runaway government spending, excessive taxation, oppressive regulation, food shortages, fuel shortages or natural disasters such as deadly pandemics or lethal changes in the world's climate.

Robert Higgs

#22. 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

#23. The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it's in public or somewhere, and it's just, how inconvenient that that's there. It takes up so much room, and it's so oppressive.

John Lurie

#24. The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more disgraceful by publishing it.

Karl Marx

#25. Now I understand why women want to have children - it's simply the urge to create happiness for yourself, somehow to fill the oppressive, unbearable emptiness in your soul.

Nina Lugovskaya

#26. But you get used to the air alright in the end. When you're here for the second or third time you'll hardly notice how oppressive the air is.

Franz Kafka

#27. Misgovernment ... will often be reflected in oppressive or aggressive policies towards groups within the state or towards the state's neighbours.

Margaret Thatcher

#28. This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#29. What is amazing and revolutionary today will be oppressive tomorrow.

Bryant McGill

#30. Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home.

Shirin Ebadi

#31. You might hear people decry the loss of privacy in today's world, but radical transparency is dramatically reducing violence everywhere. Most violent things happen in the dark when no one's watching, whether it's an oppressive dictator or someone causing violence in the inner city.

Peter Diamandis

#32. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.

Henry A. Wallace

#33. It's Aslan, the lion from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. It's a symbol of my hellish childhood. I struggled through my oppressive teenage years and when I turned 18 I escaped. Like Aslan I was finally free.

Christina Ricci

#34. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy.

G.K. Chesterton

#35. The suburbs are incredibly oppressive. I actually believe that the suburbs are much more dangerous than the ghettos.

Aaron Rose

#36. Will you stop drinking whiskey? Let me plead with you to do so. And if the sisters would not think it oppressive, I would ask them to not drink quite so much strong tea.

Brigham Young

#37. Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition.

Lysander Spooner

#38. The moment-when I could no longer face myself in the mirror-wasn't easily explained; nor was the oppressive misery I experienced once I finally became the person I was meant to be but then realized with terrific horror how much I still hated her.

Jodi LaPalm

#39. There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.

Baron De Montesquieu

#40. Me, pro. The objectionable case of I. The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive. Each is all three.

Ambrose Bierce

#41. It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive. (Mr. Bell)

Elizabeth Gaskell

#42. Also, this is our lives for a huge part of the year and we did not want to be in prison, 24/7. It was too oppressive. So, we were like, "How can we get out? Let's see their lives, a little bit." That was really fun.

Jenji Kohan

#43. According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

Alain De Botton

#44. I am at the moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold.

Charles Dickens

#45. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Mark Twain

#46. Our government is deeply disordered; its credit is impaired; its debt increasing; its expenditures extravagant and wasteful; its disbursements without efficient accountability; and its taxes (for duties are but taxes) enormous, unequal, and oppressive to the great producing classes of the country.

John C. Calhoun

#47. What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.

Jimmy Wales

#48. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

James Madison

#49. The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.

Jonathan Miller

#50. Given the fact that I have a family and responsibilities, it's the mark of a man to find the courage to do what is right in the face of oppressive evil.

John Rhys-Davies

#51. It's interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they're reduced to the barest terms of survival. That's what provides tension in a lot of films.

Sharon Salzberg

#52. 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

#53. It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

#54. Los Angeles was great fun because it was the polar opposite of Moscow in 1980. It was sunny and bright, lots of colours around, whereas Moscow was dark and oppressive.

Daley Thompson

#55. All that waiting around for a glimmer of stage time, just getting angry every week. It was just an oppressive, horrible, horrible place to be. I went to work feeling nauseous.

Jay Mohr

#56. There is a difference between needy and helpless. While doling out free benefits to the needy is condemnable, the helpless must be assisted to get their lives back on track. No one should be living in fear or under oppressive conditions.

Sumit Agarwal

#57. We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

#58. Did we risk our lives to defend a just society, where guilt must be proven and not assumed? Or are we no better than the oppressive kings from whom our fathers fled?

Julie Berry

#59. To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it.

Pierre Bayard

#60. Nothing is so oppressive as a secret: women find it difficult to keep one long; and I know a goodly number of men who are women in this regard.

Jean De La Fontaine

#61. In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

Julian Barnes

#62. He loved that anxiety, that terrible and oppressive anxiety which he experienced during the game of dice, during the suspense of high stakes.

Hermann Hesse

#63. To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won't keep on that way.

Joko Beck

#64. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform. The

Susan Cain

#65. Such Africans soon encounter the many contradictions inherent in colonialism as a civilizing institution and agent of European culture on the one hand, and colonialism as an oppressive, exploitative, and violent political and economic system and agent of white supremacy on the other.

John Mukum Mbaku

#66. Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.

Simone Weil

#67. It seems that the rebels found the chaos of transition more difficult to accept than the tyranny they had known before. They joyfully welcomed back authority-even oppressive authority-for it was less painful for them than uncertainty.

Brandon Sanderson

#68. The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

H.L. Mencken

#69. To return after long years of painful absence to some place which has been the scene of our former joys, and whence the force of circumstance, and not choice, has driven us, is oppressive to the heart.

Samuel Lover

#70. Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times.

Federica Montseny

#71. I grew up in Cuba under a strong, military, oppressive dictatorship. So as a teenager, I found myself involved in a revolution. I remember during that time, a young, charismatic leader rose up, talking about hope and change. His name was Fidel Castro.

Rafael Cruz

#72. No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed.

Junot Diaz

#73. Wisdom is more faithful than a woman,
and knowledge is more faithful than a friend.
Folly is more oppressive than a tyrant,
and evil more overwhelming than fury.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#74. Winter was much slower. Cold June days were downright oppressive.

G.J. Walker-Smith

#75. 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

#76. Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them.

Hanya Yanagihara

#77. This was a pattern America would repeat throughout Latin America where any government, no matter how corrupt, brutal or oppressive, was supported in preference to popular socialism.

Jimmy Thomson

#78. Sharia is the most oppressive system on earth. It encourages people to lie, if it's for the benefits of Islam. It doesn't allow Muslims to leave Islam, and there's a death penalty in all the schools of Sharia against those that leave Islam. Sharia defines what jihad is.

Mark Durie

#79. The speed of modern life is an oppressive thing, and the corporate world is quick to punish those with an honest heart.

Fennel Hudson

#80. The room does feel strange, oppressive even, with the TV off. In fact, Katie can't remember ever being in this room without it on. It's as if they're missing their fifth sibling, the one who never shuts up and demands all the attention.

Lisa Genova

#81. Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?

Judith Butler

#82. Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual.

Gao Xingjian

#83. Ultimately, being open and respectful towards each other is much more powerful as a way to diffuse hatred and anger than, you know, layering on, you know, big walls and oppressive policies.

Justin Trudeau

#84. I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

#85. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.

Ronald Reagan

#86. Small groups or communities may be far more oppressive to the individual than larger ones. Men are in many ways freer in large cities than in small villages.

Morris Raphael Cohen

#87. I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision ... is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.

Barbara Deming

#88. I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).

Paul Theroux

#89. The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#90. Allah will support the just state even if it is led by unbelievers, but Allah will not support the oppressive state even if it is led by believers

Ibn Taymiyyah

#91. Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

Noam Chomsky

#92. 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one," wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."31

Gordon S. Wood

#93. The richness of our contemporary visual world must be seen as a danger. It is an overwhelming and oppressive world. A world that manifests itself fundamentally through the image is only a few steps from totalitarian manipulation.

Edmundo Desnoes

#94. The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised.

John C. Calhoun

#95. Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What's real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won't necessarily understand why it worked.

Scott Adams

#96. It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon.

Ned Beauman

#97. There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.

Sigmund Freud

#98. Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human...

Anita B. Sulser PhD

#99. I was born in Turkey in an extremely oppressive climate at the time of pogroms, massacres, really. An immigrant appreciates the freedom more.

Elia Kazan

#100. In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

James W. Loewen