Oppressors Quotes - Page 4

• Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.

  Mark Twain

  Kings, Bread, Earth

  Mark Twain (1992). “Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays: 1852-1890”, Library of America

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• It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power - power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

  Eric Hoffer

  Want, Oppressed

  "War and Conflict Quotations: A Worldwide Dictionary". Book by Jean Freestone Thomsett and Michael Thomsett, 1997.

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• We have to stop arresting prostitutes and not arresting traffickers and pimps. It's absurd. We're arresting the victim or the survivor and not the oppressor.

  Gloria Steinem

  Pimp, Survivor, Victim

  Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. October 28, 2010.

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• My great lesson from Auschwitz is: whoever wants to dehumanize any other must first be dehumanized himself.
  The oppressors are no longer really human, whatever uniform they wear.

  Hajo Meyer

  Lessons, Want, Uniforms

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• So what does it look like to live a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ? It looks like walking with, loving with, and doing life with those who are different from you. What binds you together is Christ. It looks like striving together to make Christ known. What motivates you is Christ. And it looks like standing with courage against all oppressors, natural or supernatural. What secures you is Christ.

  Matt Chandler

  Jesus, Together, Doe

  Matt Chandler, Jared C. Wilson (2013). “To Live Is Christ to Die Is Gain”, p.46, David C Cook

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• If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions, not wholly unworthy of its almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly, alone, hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Country, Soul, World

  Abraham Lincoln (1989). “Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 1: 1832-1858: Library of America #45”, p.65, Library of America

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• People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

  Bertrand Russell

  People, Competition, Wish

  Bertrand Russell (2002). “The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970”, p.215, Psychology Press

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• The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspirational, Brother, Men

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1968). “I Have a Dream: The Quotations of Martin Luther King, Jr”

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• When someone hurts you or harms you, even if it is a deep wound, forgive them. Forgive them NOT for their sake, but as a sign of gratitude to Allah. Why you ask? For making you the victim and not the oppressor. There is no crime in being a victim, rather it brings you closer to Allah and rids you of sins. But as for the oppressor, they'll have to face their Lord one day. So in reality, they are their own greatest victims.

  Suhaib Webb

  Gratitude, Hurt, Reality

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• It is necessary to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist – the potential victim within that we must rescue – otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.

  Bell Hooks

  Thinking, Way, Firsts

  bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.33, Routledge

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• Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Long, Evil, Oppression

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1964). “A Martin Luther King Treasury”

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• Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Men, Atheism, Veils

  Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd (2008). “A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution”, p.221, Oxford University Press

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• The grave unites; where e'en the great find rest, And blended lie th' oppressor and th' oppressed!

  Alexander Pope

  Lying, Graves, Oppressed

  Alexander Pope (1853). “The poetical works of Alexander Pope. Ed. by R. Carruthers”, p.134

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• Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one's oppressor.

  Florence King

  Mean, Simple, People

  Florence King (1993). “Southern Ladies & Gentlemen”, p.155, Macmillan

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• Anyone who recognizes this regime [Israel] because of the pressure of the World oppressor, or because of naiveté or selfishness, will be eternally disgraced and will burn in the fury of the Islamic nations.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

  Islamic, Israel, Selfishness

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• Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones, having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Government, Understanding, Rifles

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

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• To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother's keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .

  Thomas A. Edison

  Motivational, Beautiful, Brother

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• The severest trial of oppression is the constant outrage which one suffers at the thought of the oppressor. What Jesus discovered was how to avoid the inner devastations. His technique was to practice the opposite emotion... a man may not get his freedom or possessions back, but he's less miserable. It's a difficult lesson.

  B. F. Skinner

  Jesus, Men, Opposites

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• Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother's womb is not enough to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Mother, Hate, Long

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• And yet every so often, the heart of America, shuddering with indignation, sends a nervous spasm through the gentle back of the Andes, and tumultuous shock waves assault the surface of the land. Three times the cuppola of proud Santo Domingo has collapsed from on high to the rhythm of broken bones and its worn walls have opened and fallen too. But the foundations they rest on are unmoved, the great blocks of the Temple of the Sun exhibit their gray stone indifferently; however colossal the disaster befalling its oppressor, not one of its huge rocks shifts from its place.

  Che Guevara

  Wall, Block, Heart

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• In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

  Howard Zinn

  Running, Long, Culture

  Howard Zinn (2015). “A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present”, p.10, Routledge

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• A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

  Walter Mosley

  Dream, Father, Book

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• This oppressor/oppressed cultural Marxist thing is you're an authentic woman and an authentic black even only if you support liberal causes. If you are a woman, if you are a Hispanic, if you are black, and you abide by a value system that believes in limited government and constitutional principles, you are an apostate to the utopian ideals of the left, and you are not protected, and you are pilloried, and that is why I became a conservative because I thought it was fundamentally unfair, fundamentally un-American.

  Andrew Breitbart

  Believe, Government, Support

  Source: www.newsbusters.org

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• I go where there are no slaves, hangmen or oppressors; where faith does not kill; where the one who reigns is God.

  Jose Rizal

  Doe, Reign, Noli Me Tangere

  "Mi Ultimo Adios". Poem by José Rizal, translated by Charles Derbyshire. Stanza 13, 1897.

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• The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!

  Frederick Douglass

  Country, Writing, Names

  What to the Slave is the 4th of July?, delivered 4 July 1852

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