Quotes about Oppression

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

It's easier to blame the person with less power.

the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will...

You haven't got a chance kid,' he had told him glumly.'They hate Jews.' 'But I'm not Jewish,' answered Clevinger. 'It will make no difference,' Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. 'They're after everybody.

Pharaoh is clearly a metaphor. He embodies and represents raw, absolute, worldly power. He is, like Pilate after him, a stand-in for the whole of the empire. As the agent of the "empire of force," he reappears in many different personae.9

The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. "Pharaoh" reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.

Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.

Silence is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo, with its unbearable distribution of power and wealth.

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

Save us, Lord, from a religion that ignores the cries of the exploited and oppressed. Lead us into a deeper faith that challenges injustice and makes the sacrifices that must be made to build a society that is ever more truly human. Amen.

The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.

The power of King Jesus is intrinsically revolutionary and subversive against every repressive regime.