Oppression Quotes - page 23
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent De Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor "will forgive them the bread you give them."
Eric Hoffer
The white kids are being conditioned to feel superior-so you can't attack the whites, you have to attack the system. But we have to attack with loving ourselves first. If we don't love more, we ain't revolutionizing nothin'. People who love themselves won't tolerate deception; they won't tolerate oppression...
Jimmy Santiago Baca
And yet people ask what's the harm of religion - and we cite all these different problems with religion: the global gag-rules and things like that, the oppression of different people - but there's a bigger harm with religion, and it's the reason why I'm outspoken about it, and that's because the average feel-good Johnny-in-the-pew person who is decent and kind and loving and good to their family and generally a good person to be around has polluted their mind to the point where they are unable to take credit for their accomplishments and responsibility for their actions. They are unable to interact on an interpersonal level with the people around them, to build a community in this cooperative society where that is absolutely essential. They have got this mentality that they are worthless without God.
Matt Dillahunty
All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. The existent who is regarded as inessential cannot fail to demand the re-establishment of her sovereignty.
Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence.
Simone de Beauvoir
[T]he left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left's unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today-the source of its angst and hatefulness-is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.
Shelby Steele
We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that - for that is the story of human progress; that's the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.
Barack Obama
Your Yes to God demands your No to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and the poor, to all godlessness and mocking of the holy. Your Yes to God demands a brave No to everything that will ever hinder you from serving God alone, whether it be your profession, your property, your house, your honor before the world. Faith means decision.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.
Emma Goldman
A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred. Violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.
Martin Luther King Jr.
A public can only arrive at enlightenment slowly. Through revolution, the abandonment of personal despotism may be engendered and the end of profit-seeking and domineering oppression may occur, but never a true reform of the state of mind. Instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones, will serve as the guiding reins of the great, unthinking mass.
All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely, the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters. But I hear people clamor on all sides: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, drill! The tax collector: Don't argue, pay! The pastor: Don't argue, believe!
Immanuel Kant
After Bruno's death, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Descartes seemed about to take the leadership of human thought... in promoting an evolution doctrine as regards the mechanical formation of the solar system... but his constant dread of persecution, both from Catholics and Protestants, led him steadily to veil his thoughts and even to suppress them. The execution of Bruno had occurred in his childhood, and in the midst of his career he had watched the Galileo struggle in all its stages. He had seen his own works condemned by university after university under the direction of theologians and placed upon the Roman Index. ...Since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no great thinker had been so completely abased and thwarted by theological oppression.
René Descartes
