Oppression Quotes - Page 26

• Trying to help an oppressed person is like trying to put your arm around somebody with a sunburn.

  Florynce Kennedy

  Trying, Arms, Helping

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• Horizontal hostility may be expressed in sibling rivalry or in competitive dueling which wrecks not only office tranquility or suburban domesticity but also some radical political groups and, it must be sadly said, some women's liberation groups. ... [it is] misdirected anger that rightly should be focused on the external causes of oppression.

  Florynce Kennedy

  Sibling, Office, Political

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• All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
  You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak

  Margaret Walker

  Heart, Dreamer, Violence

  Margaret Walker (2013). “This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems”, p.70, University of Georgia Press

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• Hence, when some members of the Iranian diaspora, especially women at the moment, use different tropes including the trope of the veil and the issue of gender to construct an image of oppression or to describe the 'silenced' Iranian woman, western intellectuals, policymakers, and publishing houses are all quick to introduce them as presenters of the authentic Iranian experience.

  Mohammad Marandi

  Issues, Publishing House, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I can be all pissed off at the oppression of the state, but what does that really mean? Well, it's the tacit consent of a public.

  Cecily McMillan

  Mean, Pissed Off, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

  Sidney Poitier

  Running, Florida, Racism

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• 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.

  Lajos Kossuth

  Peace, Mistake, Men

  Lajos Kossuth (1852). “Kossuth in New England: A Full Account of the Hungarian Governor's Visit to Massachusetts ; with Speeches, and the Addresses that Were Made to Him ...”, p.46

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• By identifying with the powerful, the disempowered achieve a measure of safety, at least for a moment. By doing the bidding of those in power, they become a necessary part of the system, useful so long as they serve to contain the stirrings and strivings of the oppressed. By making the rules and values of their oppressor their own, they separate themselves from the rest of their group and, temporarily at least, assuage the pain of their stigmatized status.

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Pain, Powerful, Long

  Lillian B. Rubin (1991). “Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution?”, HarperCollins

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• No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child ... No slave was ever so much the property of his master as the child is of his parent ... Never were the rights of man ever so disregarded as in the case of the child.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Men, Rights

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• Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

  Paulo Freire

  Mean, Violence, Excess

  Paulo Freire (2013). “Education for Critical Consciousness”, p.17, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Abandonment

  Gabriel García Márquez's Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the role of a writer, www.farnamstreetblog.com. 1982.

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• Press not a falling man too far; 'tis virtue:
  His faults lie open to the laws; let them,
  Not you, correct him.

  William Shakespeare

  Lying, Fall, Men

  William Shakespeare (1833). “The plays and poems of William Shakspeare”, p.564

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• Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

  Amanda Lindhout

  Faces, Somalia, Unimaginable

  "Kidnapping survivor tells of 460 days of hell". Interview with Emily Bazelon, www.stuff.co.nz. September 04, 2013.

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• My philosophy is such that I am not going to vote against the oppressed. I have been oppressed, and so I am always going to have avote for the oppressed, regardless of whether that oppressed is black or white or yellow or the people of the Middle East, or what. I have that feeling.

  Septima Poinsette Clark

  Philosophy, Yellow, White

  Septima Poinsette Clark (1990). “Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement”

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• What we once thought of as necessary and proper reasons for ostracizing and marginalizing gay people, we now understand do not justify that kind of oppression.

  Donald Verrilli Jr.

  Gay, People, Kind

  Source: www.slate.com

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• What is needed in the world today is a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Rights, Soul, Humanity

  "A Revolution Is What's Called For Here" by Neale Donald Walsch, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. April 7, 2013.

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• Traditionally Marxism attracts the oppressed. This, however, is not the case in the Arab nation... The socialist programs in Arab history did not always come from the poor, but from men who had known no oppression and became the leaders of the poor. The Arab nation has never been as class-conscious as other nations.

  Saddam Hussein

  Men, Class, Leader

  "Saddam Hussein: a political biography". Book by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, 2002.

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• As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Animal, Thinking, People

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• The pacifist thinks that the alternative to war is peace; it is not. Sometimes the alternative is oppression. Sometimes certain God-given rights and liberties can be preserved only by resistance to that which would destroy them. And to defend certain basic God-given rights and liberties is not immoral but righteous.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  War, Thinking, Rights

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• If they hear people running for - president... despite all the other problems that George W. Bush made after 9/11 when he basically said after going to a mosque in Washington, "We are not at war with Islam or Muslims. We are at war with violent extremism. We are at war with people who use their religion for purposes of power and oppression."

  Hillary Clinton

  War, People, Purpose

  Hillary Clinton's speech on foreign policy and domestic issues at the Democratic presidential debate at Drake University in Iowa hosted by the CBS News, www.cbsnews.com. November 14, 2015.

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• He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Dream, Country, Memories

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• 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.

  Robert Kennedy

  Passion, Men, Justice

  Robert F. Kennedy (1998). “Make Gentle the Life of the World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy”, Harcourt

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• English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.

  Vaclav Havel

  Years, Liberty, Language

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• Oppression is as American as apple pie.

  Audre Lorde

  Apples, Pie, Apple Pie

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.114, Crossing Press

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• Because European countries now resolve differences through negotiation and consensus, there's sometimes an assumption that the entire world functions in the same way. But let us never forget ... beyond Europe's borders, in a world where oppression and violence are very real, liberation is still a moral goal, and freedom and security still need defenders.

  George W. Bush

  Country, Real, Europe

  Whitehall Palace Address on Iraq Policy, delivered 19 November 2003, Whitehall Palace -- London, England

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