Oppression Quotes

• The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Change, Kings, People

  20 Copy quote

• Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

  John F. Kennedy

  Motivational, Commitment, Tolerance

  138 Copy quote

• Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

  Frederick Douglass

  Peace, Patriotic, Ignorance

  Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia,Washington, D.C., Apr. 1886

  301 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

  Malcolm X

  Hate, Lying, Media

  736 Copy quote

• Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Freedom, 4th Of July, Direct Action

  "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 16 Apr. 1963

  134 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

  Malcolm X

  Peace, Freedom, Inspiration

  Speech in New York City, January 7, 1965.

  365 Copy quote

  Show source

• Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

  Nelson Mandela

  Inspiring, Beautiful, Hair

  Presidential Inaugural Address, 10 May 1994

  90 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would hesitate to give advice to the Dalai Lama and his people because they are suffering. The Dalai Lama suffered from exile and the people in Tibet suffer from oppression.

  Elie Wiesel

  People, Giving, Advice

  Source: www.savetibet.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppression, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Kings, Government, Long

  Alexis de Tocqueville (1982). “Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution, and Society”, p.230, University of Chicago Press

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Running, Peace, War

  Letter to John Taylor, June 1798.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Truth, Justice, Mask

  27 Copy quote

• I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

  Anton Chekhov

  Integrity, Believe, Russia

  Letter to I.I. Orlov, February 22, 1899.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Heaven, Needs, Redemption

  11 Copy quote

• As 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 even meaningful.

  Noam Chomsky

  Meaningful, Long, Democracy

  "The Relevance of Anarcho-syndicalism". Interviewed with Peter Jay, chomsky.info. July 25, 1976.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Money, Abuse, Democracy

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.567, Wordsworth Editions

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call "intellectuals," but typically not by all; there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way; how depends on the nature of the society.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Suffering, Way

  Source: chomsky.info

  9 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

  James Madison

  Inspirational, Freedom, Fear

  "The Last Enemy" by Rebecca Sato, www.pbs.org. November 11, 2010.

  228 Copy quote

  Show source

• All oppression creates a state of war.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  War, Historical, States

  Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

  141 Copy quote

  Show source

• There have been poverty, pestilence, and famine, which were due to man's inadequate mastery of nature. There have been wars, oppressions and tortures which have been due to men's hostility to their fellow men.

  Bertrand Russell

  War, Men, Mastery

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.81, Routledge

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 'Rugged individualism' has meant all the 'individualism' for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking 'supermen.' America is perhaps the best representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social opportunity to live is denounced as 'un-American' and evil in the name of that same individuality.

  Emma Goldman

  Men, Opportunity, America

  "The Individual, Society and the State". Book by Emma Goldman (p. 112), 1937.

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of 'free contract' between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

  Noam Chomsky

  Errors, Views, Ideas

  "On Anarchism". Interview with Tom Lane, chomsky.info. December 23, 1996.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Iranian women are very courageous and active, even with all the oppression.

  Farah Diba

  Courageous, Iranian, Active

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• No client ever had money enough to bribe my conscience or to stop its utterance against wrong, and oppression.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Utterance, Clients, Enough

  Abraham Lincoln, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (1950). “The Lincoln treasury”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• That's one part of oppression is to make sure you are a shameful, shamed human being. That takes care of the past.

  Malachy McCourt

  Past, Care, Shameful

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You cannot play the Song of Freedom on an instrument of oppression.

  Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

  Song, Play, Atheism

  13 Copy quote