654 Quotes About Oppression

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

Whenever there is injustice, whenever there is oppression, whenever there is suffering, a human will rise to the rescue of righteousness and obliteration of savagery, they may be called Naskar, they may be called Christ, they may be called Buddha or anything else, the name is irrelevant, but the promise is absolute. And to keep that promise is the existential duty of every human being with a wide awake conscience and upright spine.

Feminists and civil rights campaigners made white men visible in ways they'd never been before. They started to give the default dominant group equal 'otherness', and white men didn't like it. This feeling of visibility prompted men to adopt a victim status befitting an oppressed group. The patriarchy felt itself wobble and fall a notch nearer equality, but screamed as if it had fallen way below the groups it still oppressed.

A nation will never be vanished by subjugation or oppression, unless they get used to.

...we've reached a tipping point--more [women] are aware of the terms of our own oppression and of our complicity in the oppression of others.

Like many types of criminals who may often be a product of ills that exist in their society, racists are often products of similar ills – they are the uninformed hand pulling a trigger of a gun handed down to them by a vicious system of indoctrination.

In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would have it, that blacks are inherently inferior to whites or that homosexuals are all, by definition, sick. So what? Even if either condition truly is inherently undesirable, no manner of social pressure will turn blacks into whites or gays into straights. Social pressure will only exaggerate the handicap. It is still the prejudice, more than the condition, that does the harm.

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants.