Quotes About Oppression

For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.

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.

I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity.

Certainly here in the U.S., we've had fundamentalist movements that have taken very critical and hostile attitudes toward immigration and the assimilation of immigrants into our society and culture. So these tendencies are fairly universal. The problem is what if they get out of hand and become the dominant factor in a society, which can only lead to the oppression of minorities or even to war with neighboring societies with differing cultures. That's why it seems to me it's important to try to keep these tendencies toward extremism under control.

The state machine, including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument with which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument of oppression against all hostile classes; it means violence and is certainly not anything 'benevolent.' 'You are merciless.' Quite so. We definitely do not adopt a benevolent policy towards the reactionary activities of the reactionaries and the reactionary classes.

Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.

Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

The Christians committed all sorts of atrocities on the Jews by giving them the label "Killers of Christ". Hitler is not an exception but a culmination of the 2000-year long oppression of the Jews by the Christians

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

Spiritual models for me are the communities of Tibetans living in exile in India, or the banjars of Bali, which exist in times of difficulty, oppression. Alternative spaces-perhaps this kind of communication can take place over the Net? Probably only up to a point as the Net's controlled by the military. But the idea is to live outside multi-national, monocultural, commodification prison, outside the grey areas of power-mad, monied collusion.

I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression.

It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

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.

White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or ... and oppression of others.

It is a revolution that came to power with its own army and on the ruins of the army of oppression.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.

standing in line is a form of oppression

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

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.

We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood…We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.

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.

Maybe I'm the badass lady who rids Mexico of drugs, of oppression and illiteracy.

We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours.

Being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression, otherwise I would have been free to be so much more.

The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - the blackness of their skin - and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude.

Although until recently the Church was closely linked to the established order, it is beginning to take a different attitude regarding the exploitation, oppression, and alienation which prevails in Latin America. This has caused concern among the beneficiaries and defenders of capitalist society, who no longer can depend on what used to be - whether consciously or unconsciously - one of their mainstays.

We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure.

Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.

It is my interpretation from the Koran that all people have equal rights. That means men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims too. Oppression doesn't exist in Islam. And in a society where all people have equal rights, that means all people should make decisions equally... This doesn't mean that we're changing God's law, It just means we're reinterpreting laws according to the development of science - and the realities of the times.

If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. (pg. 59, "Racism and the Economy")

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.

An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.

Freemasonry must stand upon the Rock of Truth, religion, political, social, and economic. Nothing is so worthy of its care as freedom in all its aspects. "Free" is the most vital part of Freemasonry. It means freedom of thought and expression, freedom of spiritual and religious ideals, freedom from oppression, freedom from ignorance, superstition, vice and bigotry, freedom to acquire and possess property, to go and come at pleasure, and to rise or fall according to will of ability.

Oppressors in front of the Lord, truth be told shall inherit oppression, while others receive gold.

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.

Here in the US, we've built this insane infrastructure of oppression. When it's not run by a Barack Obama - who, by the way, I don't think is a perfect president - but by someone who is off-kilter, like a Carly Fiorina, that could be dangerous.

If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them.

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

Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression. Poland's struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted, demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted.

Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.

As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of the hateful foreign ideology. Believe me.

the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Socialism's results have ranged between the merely shabby and the truly catastrophic - poverty, strife, oppression and, on the killing fields of communism, the deaths this century of perhaps 100 million people. Against that doctrine was set a contrary, conservative belief in a law-governed liberty. It was this view which triumphed with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Since then, the Left has sought rehabilitation by distancing itself from its past.

By habits of thrift and economy, by way of the industrial school and college, we are coming up. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up-often through oppression, unjust discrimination and prejudice-but through them all we are coming up, and with proper habits, intelligence, and property, there is no power on earth than can permanently stay our progress.