Quotes about Oppression

The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

Behold your hard hands and your strong frames, your masters and mistresses have soft hands and delicate constitutions, and white skins; whence this difference; 'it is the Lord's doings and marvellous in our eyes.

While you have strong frames and robust constitutions, you have not the gift of intellect—you could not think for yourselves—you could not provide for yourselves—so the Lord in his infinite goodness has given you kind masters to think for you—[laughter].

To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

While I lived with my master in St. Michael's, there was a white young man, a Mr. Wilson, who proposed to keep a Sabbath school for the instruction of such slaves as might be disposed to learn to read the New Testament. We met but three times, when Mr. West and Mr. Fairbanks, both class-leaders, with many others, came upon us with sticks and other missiles, drove us off, and forbade us to meet again. Thus ended our little Sabbath school in the pious town of St. Michael's.

I esteem myself a good, persistent hater of injustice and oppression, but my resentment ceases when they cease, and I have no heart to visit upon children the sins of their fathers.

Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a nigger-breaker.

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

Totalitarians are fond of saying that Christianity is the enemy of the State—a euphemistic way of saying an enemy of themselves.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.