Quotes about Oppression

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

My right and my privilege to stand here before you has been won—won in my lifetime—by the blood and the sweat of the innocent.

I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.

Here's the reason why the peasant is wise. He's wise because he's beaten from the very start. Give him power and then you'll see how wise he is.

If the people show too much courage on this world, the society must choke them to break them - and by that, of course, kill them. The society breaks everyone, but after that many become stronger on that broken places. And those it cannot broke, it kills them.

God pity the Spanish people. Any leader they have will muck them.

God will take care of the poor trampled slave, but where will the slaveholder be when eternity begins?

Negative freedom is freedom from - freedom from oppression, whether it's a colonial power or addiction to alcohol oppressing you. You need to be freed from negative freedom. Positive freedom is freedom for, freedom to be. And that's what's routinely ignored today.

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry 'Native passes' issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.

With shame be it spoken: by her fall, the Church's liberties have been sacrificed for the sake of temporal advantages. The road to her ruin lay through the sinuous paths of riches: she has been prostituted in the streets to princes; she has conceived iniquity and will bring forth oppression to the undeserving.

She was made to stand in a garbage can for twelve hours, as the other detainees demanded that she confess her own "homosexual tendencies.