Oppression Quotes - Page 18

• The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart.

  John Jay Chapman

  Growing Up, Philosophy, Lying

  John Jay Chapman (1900). “Practical Agitation”

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• The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.

  Andrea Dworkin

  War, Men, Female

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• 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

  Historical, Liberty, Bankers

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• In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Men, Vegetarianism, Animal Rights

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• 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

  Writing, Butterfly, Men

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1973). “Strong opinions”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.

  Stephen Fry

  Phrases, Ears, World

  "Loose Ends", BBC Radio 4, 1987.

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• So many in our world today are suffering from isolation, war and oppression. So much money is spent on the construction of armaments. Many, many young people are in despair because of the danger.

  Jean Vanier

  War, Our World, People

  Jean Vanier, Ann Shearer (1989). “Community and Growth”, p.177, Paulist Press

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• I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.

  Eve Ensler

  Home, Thinking, Patterns

  Eve Ensler (2006). “Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World”, p.137, Villard

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• How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Honesty, Integrity, Lying

  "The Ordeal of Mansart". Book by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1957.

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• The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Essence, Choices, Criteria

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

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• In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.

  Emma Goldman

  Real, People, Political

  Emma Goldman (2011). “Living My Life (Two Volumes in One)”, p.324, Cosimo, Inc.

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• People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

  Assata Shakur

  Thinking, People, Tolerance

  Assata Shakur (1987). “Assata: An Autobiography”, p.277, Zed Books

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• In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Real, Ignorance, Diversity

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2011). “Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations”, p.213, Simon and Schuster

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• Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

  Jonathan Swift

  Justice, Judging, Office

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• Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

  Bell Hooks

  Feminism, Movement, Sexist

  "Feminism Is for Everybody". Book by Bell Hooks, 2000.

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• If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.

  Desmond Tutu

  Hands, People, Injustice And Oppression

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• Calvin: Somewhere in Communist Russia, I'll bet there's a little boy who has never known anything but censorship and oppression. But maybe he's heard of America, and he dreams of living in this land of freedom and opportunity! Someday, I'd like to meet that little boy... and tell him the awful TRUTH ABOUT THIS PLACE!! Calvin's Dad: Calvin, be quiet and eat the stupid Lima beans.

  Bill Watterson

  Dream, Dad, Stupid

  "Calvin and Hobbes". Book by Bill Watterson, April 1987.

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• Sometimes, people call my way of speaking ranting. Why are you always ranting and screaming, they ask. But here’s the thing…the reason why I rant is because I am a voice for many women that cannot speak out to heads of state, UN officials, and those that influence systems of oppression. And so I rant. And I will not stop ranting until my mission of equality of all girls is achieved.

  Leymah Gbowee

  Girl, Speaks Out, Voice

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• Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Country, America, Suffering

  P. J. O'Rourke (2015). “Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader”, p.1145, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression.

  Paulo Coelho

  Goodbye, Art, Couple

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• True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?

  Vaclav Havel

  Country, Calm, Enough

  Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President, April 08, 1975.

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• Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

  Malcolm X

  Freedom, Needs, Slavery

  "Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements". Book edited by George Breitman, 1965.

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• Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

  John Stuart Mill

  Mean, Details Of Life, Practice

  John Stuart Mill (2017). “The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Memoirs…”, p.189, e-artnow

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• Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the family context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement which most radically addresses the person – the personal – citing the need for the transformation of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the self.

  Bell Hooks

  Intimate Relationships, Self, Feminist

  bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.34, Routledge

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• No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Problem, Social

  Maria Montessori (1970). “The child in the family”, Contemporary Books

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