Quotes about Oppression

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust ... is in reality expressing the highest respect for law ... We will not obey your evil laws.

The negro cannot win the respect of the white people of the south or the peoples of the world if he is willing to sell the future of his children for his personal and immediate comfort and safety.

They are afraid of educated women. They are afraid of the power of knowledge.

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

You forget you have a master here,'' says the tyrant. ''I'll demolish the first who puts me out of temper! I insist on perfect sobriety and silence. Oh, boy! was that you? Frances, darling, pull his hair as you go by; I heard him snap his fingers.'' 'Frances pulled his hair heartily;

She does not know what she says. Will you ruin her, because she has not wit to help herself? Get up! You could be free instantly. That is the most diabolical deed that ever you did. We are all done for—master, mistress, and servant.

Silence! said the ruffian. To the devil with your clamour!

The Church is seen as a secular organization - a real-estate conglomerate, a powerful lobby for the oppression of women - which has little or nothing to do with spiritual transcendence. It will doubtless seek to ban this book. Less than two hundred and fifty years ago, it would have burned the author.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealised into powerlessness

Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood.

The real tragedy of humankind,' Shealtiel used to say, 'is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold their heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.

Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.