Quotes about Oppression

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.

The denial of emotion is a terrible thing; what takes time is learning that the positive path is the education of emotion, not it's uncritical indulgence, which actually locks us far more firmly in our mutual isolation. Likewise, the denial of rights is a terrible thing; and what takes time to learn is that the opposite of oppression is not a wilderness of litigation and reparation but the nurture of concrete, shared respect.

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them.

A woman alone who could read and write was suspect. Words were magic. Books were not to be trusted. What men could not understand, they wished to burn.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.

There is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to question or to know.

The defeat that had frightened her in the faces of black men was the defeat of black forever defined by white.

I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their victory, i.e. , the death of four small black girls.

She say, Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you. Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.

Wives is like children. You have to let 'em know who got the upper hand. Nothing can do that better than a good sound beating.

The brilliance of enslaving the spirit is that it is an invisible prison from which the inmate appears to derive some comfort.