Quotes about Oppression
Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.
— Margaret Atwood
He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.
— Margaret Atwood
There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak.
— Margaret Atwood
The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.
— Margaret Atwood
Yes," she said in a voice squeaky with fright. She was younger and still attractive then; she hadn't yet allowed her body to engorge. I have noted since that some kinds of men like to bully beautiful women.
— Margaret Atwood
Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did.
— Margaret Atwood
The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before, more than once.
— Margaret Atwood
They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman.
— Margaret Atwood
This white man who is saying "it takes time." For three hundred and more years they have had "time," and now it is time for them to listen.
— Fannie Lou Hamer
Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
My time in prison only deepened my resolve against apartheid. Even while I was in prison, I fought against it, teaching my cellmates about white supremacy and how to fight against it.
— Nelson Mandela