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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

100 Quotes About Oppression


Jarod Kintz
“If I have to beat you up to keep you safe, that’s just what I’ll do. It’s this kind of regard for others that makes me believe I’d be a good politician.”
― Jarod KintzThe Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They're Over.

J.K. Rowling
“Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!”
― J.K. RowlingHarry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Karl Marx
“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx

Veronica Roth
“Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.”
― Veronica RothInsurgent

Carl Sagan
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl SaganThe Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Robert F. Kennedy
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

Nelson Mandela
“(...) when a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Nelson MandelaLong Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

James Madison
“If tyranny and oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
― James Madison

Alan Moore
“Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
― Alan MooreV for Vendetta

Audre Lorde
“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde

George Orwell
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
― George Orwell1984

Paulo Freire
“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”
― Paulo FreirePedagogy of the Oppressed

Aung San Suu Kyi
“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
― Aung San Suu KyiFreedom from Fear

Booker T. Washington
“You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.”
― Booker T. Washington

Gore Vidal
“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”
― Gore Vidal

Thomas Jefferson
“Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God.”
― Thomas Jefferson

Malcolm X
“I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin...”
― Malcolm X

Aung San Suu Kyi
“Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.”
― Aung San Suu KyiFreedom from Fear

Winston  Churchill
“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
― Winston ChurchillBlood, Sweat and Tears

Horace Greeley
“It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”
― Horace Greeley

Paulo Freire
“Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.”
― Paulo FreirePedagogy of the Oppressed

Theodore Roosevelt
“We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

Fidel Castro
“The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.”
― Fidel Castro

“We cannot suffer with the poor when we are unwilling to confront those persons and systems that cause poverty. We cannot set the captives free when we do not want to confront those who carry the keys. We cannot profess our solidarity with those who are oppressed when we are unwilling to confront the oppressor. Compassion without confrontation fades quickly to fruitless sentimental commiseration. (p. 122)”
― Henri J. M. Nouwen Donald P. McNeill Douglas A. Morrison

Eugene Victor Debs
“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People."

(Canton, OH, Anti-War Speech, June 16, 1918)”
― Eugene Victor DebsVoices of a People's History of the United States

Wally Lamb
“Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”
― Wally LambI Know This Much is True

Toni Morrison
“If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.”
― Toni Morrison

Malcolm X
“And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare.”
― Malcolm X

بلال فضل
“لم يعد يدهشني الظلم ولا الغباء ولا الخوف ولا العناد ولا الجحود ولكن سأبقى دائمًا مندهشًا أمام قدرة الإنسان الفريدة على النسيان. آفة حارتنا.”
― بلال فضل

Paulo Freire
“The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”
― Paulo FreirePedagogy of the Oppressed

Frederick Douglass
“Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.”
― Frederick Douglass

Albert Camus
“The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.”
― Albert CamusThe Fall

A.R. Bernard
“The ignorance of the oppressed is strength for the oppressor.”
― A.R. Bernard

Paulo Freire
“To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders. ”
― Paulo FreirePedagogy of the Oppressed

بلال فضل
“سأظل واقفًا مع الطرف الذي يدين القمع وقتل المدنيين وضربهم وإهانة النساء حتى ولو وقف الكون كله في الطرف الذي يدين الضحايا ويتملق الجلادين”
― بلال فضل

Wilhelm Reich
“And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express”
― Wilhelm ReichBeyond Psychology: Letters and Journals, 1934-1939

Heinrich Heine
“Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."

(Almansor)
― Heinrich HeineHeinrich Heine's gesammelte Werke

Jarod Kintz
“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of taking away your freedoms. –Uncle Sam
”
― Jarod KintzThis is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks

Jessica Therrien
“All we have is now, this
moment. If you live in the future, you’ll miss things, right
here, right now, and you’ll regret it later.”
― Jessica TherrienOppression

“We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

― Lydia Maria Francis Child

Jack D. Forbes
“The "norm" for humanity is love.
Brutality is an aberration.
We are not sinners by nature.
We learn to be bad.
We are taught to stray from our good paths.
We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.”
― Jack D. ForbesColumbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Imperialism, Exploitation and Terrorism

Robert Anton Wilson
“But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.'

'What sort of tools?'

'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.”
― Robert Anton WilsonThe Eye in the Pyramid

Christine de Pizan
“[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.”
― Christine de PizanDitié de Jehanne d'Arc

“Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.”
― Derrick BellEthical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth

bell hooks
“..the struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.”
― bell hooksFeminist Theory from Margin to Center

Golda Poretsky
“Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with “good” bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go “bad”, and those with “bad” bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have “good” bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle.”
― Golda Poretsky

Christine de Pizan
“When we take your person into account, you who are a young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion who casts the rebels down and feeds France with the sweet, nourishing milk of peace, here indeed is something quite extraordinary!

For if God performed such a great number of miracles through Joshua who conquered many a place and cast down many an enemy, he, Joshua, was a strong and powerful man. But, after all, a woman – a simple shepherdess – braver than any man ever was in Rome! As far as God is concerned, this was easily accomplished.

But as for us, we never heard tell of such an extraordinary marvel, for the prowess of all the great men of the past cannot be compared to this woman's whose concern it is to cast out our enemies. This is God's doing: it is He who guides her and who has given her a heart greater than that of any man.”
― Christine de PizanDitié de Jehanne d'Arc

Christine de Pizan
“Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by a woman, something that 5000 men could not have done – and the traitors [have been] exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible.”
― Christine de PizanDitié de Jehanne d'Arc

Seyla Benhabib
“All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.”
― Seyla Benhabib

Marjane Satrapi
“When we're afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.”
― Marjane SatrapiThe Complete Persepolis







Assata Shakur
“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 ShakurAssata: An Autobiography

Jane Addams
“In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.”
― Jane AddamsTwenty Years at Hull House

“The elephants are dancing on the graves of squeeling mice.”
― Cream

Robert Walser
“How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present”
― Robert WalserThe Tanners

“Let them shoot us in the head,
My blood will grow roots
and will blossom.”
― Visar ZhitiThe Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

Antonia Fraser
“As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.”
― Antonia Fraser

Sheryl WuDunn
“It's no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work”
― Sheryl WuDunnHalf the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

Andrea Dworkin
“If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.”
― Andrea Dworkin

Howard Zinn
“Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it...

In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did.”
― Howard ZinnYou Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Edward Abbey
“The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.”
― Edward Abbey

Wilhelm Reich
“Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.”
― Wilhelm ReichListen, Little Man!

John le Carré
“Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”
― John le CarréThe Little Drummer Girl

“When the oppression, increases to a certain level, people start to retaliate it with all their forces. Then unity and assiduity play a vital role in achieving their goals! Situation of our country has gotten so worse that it is actually high time for revolution. But the big question before us is "How to do it?”
― Mohtasham Usmani

نجيب محفوظ
“جدارة الرسالات السامية تقاس عادة بما تحققه من سعادة للبشر تتمثل أول ما تتمثل في الأخذ بيد المضطهدين”
― نجيب محفوظSugar Street

“Assist your Muslim brother, whether he be an oppressor or oppressed. "Bu how shall we doit when he is an oppressor?" enquired a companion. Muhammad replied, "Assisting an oppressor by forbidding and witholding him from oppression.”
― Muhammad

Andrea Dworkin
“The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.”
― Andrea Dworkin

Christine de Pizan
“How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?”
― Christine de PizanThe Book of the City of Ladies

“Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.”
― Gary SteinerAnimals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship

Christopher Hitchens
“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.

I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”
― Christopher HitchensHitch-22: A Memoir

“The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.”
― Catherine KellerThe Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

Wilhelm Reich
“It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge.”
― Wilhelm ReichListen, Little Man!

Tennessee Williams
“For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.”
― Tennessee Williams

Ayn Rand
“I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.”
― Ayn RandWe the Living

“I graduated pretty quickly. When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids.

I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never said a word in public.

I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind's eye.... But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes.

Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro.”
― Medgar Evers

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“Nos instruyen y preparan en la juventud para una profesión, para cumplir los deberes ciudadanos, para el servicio militar, nos enseñaban las reglas del aseo, a comportarnos bien y hasta a comprender lo bello (esto último no tanto). Pero la instrucción, la educación, la experiencia, no nos preparan en absoluto para la gran prueba de nuestra vida: para el arresto por nada y para el sumario sobre nada.”
― Aleksandr I. SolzhenitsynThe Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Richelle E. Goodrich
“Some live for their own joy and pleasure.
Some live to ease the burdens of others.
Then there are those who seem to exist for pain's sake only; that in the end the wrathful fire sent to consume their oppressors will be justified."

~ In loving memory of Miss Annabelle Fancher”
― Richelle E. GoodrichSecrets of a Noble Key Keeper

“ABYSS

Our country lives
Among the dead
And dies among the living

Sometimes.”
― Visar ZhitiThe Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

“The core of liberation theology is profoundly "theologal" - that is, rooted in the very nature of God. You see, there's an immediate relationship between God, oppression, liberation: God is in the poor who cry out. And God is the one who listens to the cry and liberates, so that the poor no longer need to cry out. ( Leonardo Boff, p. 166)”
― Mev PuleoStruggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

James Lee Burke
“But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.”
― James Lee BurkeJolie Blon's Bounce

“We recognize, however dimly, that greater efficiency, ease, and security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that law and order can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered, for whatever good reason, are freedoms lost.”
― Walter Cronkite preface to the 1984 edition of George Orwell's book "1984"

B.F. Skinner
“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. SkinnerWalden Two

“Christmas has become a public affirmation of the power and benignity of the state, to which we all make obeisance in the sybolism of the breath test ceremony.”
― Auberon Waugh

William T. Vollmann
“Perhaps Bug and Tony should have been allies. But any successful structure of domination always gets the weak to reject each other.”
― William T. Vollmann

Joel T. McGrath
“An individual excels where the institution fails.”
― Joel T. McGrath

“BLOODY LIPS

The bloody wound
Of the gladiator
Gurgles out life's end.

The cries of acclimations from the stands
Fill the sky with raging tigers.

Waving their arms about to incite the masses
The aging notables add an air of dignity to the arena.
Making their separate entries
they
K
N
E
E
L
over the still-warm corpses
Of the young. Their withered lips they pose
Upon the fresh flowing wounds
And, to prolong their lives – so they believe,
Suck, ravenously suck out the blood, blood, blood.

Fresh blood from the sun
Flowing into filthy veins
As into sewage pipes,

And thus the Heart of the Nation is abandoned.”
― Visar ZhitiThe Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

“Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance.”
― Gary SteinerAnimals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship

Jon Ronson
“A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn’t see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.”
― Jon RonsonThe Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.”
― Nick Cohen

Sergio De La Pava
“Look, people need to conform the external reality they face daily with this subjective feeling they likewise experience constantly. To do this they have two options. First, they can achieve what passes for great things. Now the external reality matches their feeling; they really are better than the rest and maybe they'll even be remembered as such. These are the ambitious people, the overachievers. These are also, however, the people who go on these abominable talk shows where they can trade their psychoses for exposure on that box, modernity's ultimate achievement. Not that this tact, being ambitious, is not the preferred course of action. The reason is it's the equivalent of sticking your neck out which we all know is dangerous. Instead many act like they have no ambition whatsoever. Their necks come back in and they're safe. Only problem is now they're at everyone else's level, which we've seen is untenable. The remedy of course is that everyone else needs to be sunk. This helps explain racism's enduring popularity. If I myself don't appear to be markedly superior to everyone else at least I'm part of the better race, country, religion et cetera. This in turn reflects well on my individual worth. There are other options, of course. For example, you can constantly bemoan others' lack of moral worth by extension elevating yourself. Think of the average person's reaction to our clients. Do these people strike you as so truly righteous that they are viscerally pained by our clients' misdeeds or are they similarly flawed people looking for anything to hang their hat on? The latter obviously, they're vermin.”
― Sergio De La PavaA Naked Singularity

Andrea Dworkin
“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.”
― Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin
“When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“If it would destroy [a 12-year-old boy] to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?”
― Tony Porter

“I'm looking to be shot any time I step out of my car . . . If I die, it will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.”
― Medgar Evers

Andrea Dworkin
“Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice...

Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?”
― Andrea DworkinIntercourse

Darnell Lamont Walker
“The thing about oppression is this: when you hold someone down, you, too, have to be there to make sure they don't move.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

Darnell Lamont Walker
“The oppressor is never as free as they think they are”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

Martin Luther King Jr.
“I was in the kitchen drinking coffee when I heard Coretta cry, "Martin, Martin, come quickly!" I put down my cup and ran toward the living room. As I approached the front window Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus: "Darling, it's empty!”
― Martin Luther King Jr.The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“...it is not really the difference the oppressor fears so much as the similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shit on... . He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different.”
― Cherrie MoragoEsta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces de Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los Estados Unidos

“I walk the city,
through its crush of people
and its smells:
body odour, rotting food,
vomit and urine.
A cocktail
of oppression and freedom.”
― Emma CameronCinnamon Rain

“May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin!”
― Joseph Warren

1 comment:

Don't Troll, if you can't add anything helpful, don't post.