Injustice And Oppression Quotes

If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible. ~ Desmond Tutu

Law and freedom must be indivisible partners. For without law, there can be no freedom, only choas and disorder; and without freedom, law is but a cynical veneer for injustice and oppression. ~ Ronald Reagan

There is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense. ~ Michael Albert

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion. ~ Anthony Bourdain

A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression. ~ Edward Gibbon

Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession - to defend it against every thrust from within or without. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

This is a moral universe, which means that despite all the evidence that seems to be to the contrary, there is no way that evil and injustice and oppression and lies can have the last word ... that is what has upheld the morale of our people, to know that in the end good will prevail. ~ Desmond Tutu

The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. ~ Edmund Burke

Let us never cease to feel compassion for those in want. Let us never tire of helping victims of injustice and oppression. He who puts his faith in the restoration of human dignity cannot be wrong. ~ Poul Hartling

If people in the position of power are not made to be accountable, then, ungodliness, injustice and oppression will continue to be the order of the day in the society. ~ Sunday Adelaja

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. ~ Frederick Douglass

The great biblical tradition enjoins on all peoples the duty to hear the voice of the poor. It bids us break the bonds of injustice and oppression which give rise to glaring, and indeed scandalous, social inequalities. ~ Pope Francis

Reforming the social structures which perpetuate poverty and the exclusion of the poor first requires a conversion of mind and heart. ~ Pope Francis

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

It is for real that injustice and oppression will not have the last word. There was a time when Hitler looked like he was going to vanquish all of Europe, and where is he now? ~ Desmond Tutu

Government" itself does no harm, because it is a fictional entity. But the belief in "government" – the notion that some people actually have the moral right to rule over others – has caused immeasurable pain and suffering, injustice and oppression, enslavement and death. ~ - Larken Rose

Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, his will for us will prevail, love will prevail over hate, justice over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness. ~ Desmond Tutu

I was born free, yet today I am in chains. Invisible, they were loosely draped and passed unnoticed until the age of understanding reduced my life to a narrow segment of fear. - Sultana ~ Jean Sasson

You can't fight and claim you want to be free from the oppressor while still holding tight to things the oppressor gave you. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

No, no, my friend. You are kind, and you mean well, but you can never understand these things as I do. You've never been oppressed. ~ S. Alice Callahan

Men and women are learning animals. If you do not see what they have learned, you're blind. They are creatures ever changing, ever improving, ever expanding their vision and the capacity of their hearts. You are not fair to them when you speak of this as the most bloody century; you are not seeing the light that shines ever more radiantly on account of the darkness; you are not. seeing the evolution of the human soul! ... ... True, what you say about war. Yes, and the cries of the dying, I too have heard them; we have all heard them, through all the decades; and even now, the world is shocked by daily reports of armed conflict. But it is the outcry against these horrors which is the light I speak of; it's the attitudes which were never possible in the past. It is the intolerance of thinking men and women in power who for the first time in the history of the human race truly want to put an end to injustice in all forms.
Marius to Akasha (The Vampire Chronicles) ~ Anne Rice

What dost thou know of suffering and oppression! I and my people know, but not thou. ~ Mark Twain

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about. ~ Alan King

Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look. ~ Walter Kaufmann

I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art. ~ Francisco Goya

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy. ~ John Brunner

There can be no peace among men and nations, so long as the strong continues to oppress the weak, so long as injustice is done to other peoples, just so long we will have cause for war, and make a lasting peace an impossibility. ~ Marcus Garvey

Hawaii once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Michener. in Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.
How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii's rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem. ~ Tom Robbins

The idea of a king is to be a protector of the rich against unjust treatment, of the people against insult and oppression. Whereas a tyrant, as has often been repeated, has no regard to any public interest, except as conducive to his private ends; his aim is pleasure, the aim of a king, honor. Wherefore also in their desires they differ; the tyrant is desirous of riches, the king, of what brings honor. And the guards of a king are citizens, but of a tyrant mercenaries. ~ Aristotle.

The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression. ~ Ilana Mercer

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ~ John Stuart Mill

My mission: to be an advocate and champion for humanity and this planet we call Earth, and to expose injustice, inequality and "stupidity" in whatever form or wherever it might exist, and have fun while doing it. This is my solemn pledge. ~ Nisfan Nawaz

My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she'd learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother's hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free. ~ Patricia Engel

Peace with non-fundamentalists terrifies the fundamentalist because to them, being Christian doesn't mean just being 'good' - it means being 'better' than others. Being better that others means having to see them as enemies - and making war on them. The fundamentalist views not being allowed to make war on their enemies as oppression of their faith, or defeat. ~ Christina Engela

Ah well." Gignomai turned slowly round. "It's not often commented on, but when you stop and think, mercy is the biggest injustice of them all. ~ K.J. Parker

Our history in this country dates from the moment that restless men among us became restless under oppression and rose against it ... Agitation, contentions, ceaseless unrest, constant aspiring
a race so moved must prevail. ~ Timothy Thomas Fortune

But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression ~ John Locke

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. ~ Frederick Douglass

All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood. Nothing shall be legitimate to a Muslim which belongs to a fellow Muslim unless it was given freely and willingly. Do not, therefore, do injustice to yourselves. ~ Muhammad

To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us. The ~ Mark Fisher

She has grown up, another decides, as if responding to the injustice of racism is childish and her previous demonstration of emotion was free-floating and detached from any external actions by others. ~ Claudia Rankine

The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'? ~ Christina Engela

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that's not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain? ~ Stephen Fry

Critical analysis tells us not just that injustice exists, but how and why power plays take place historically and specifically, not simply as the general order of things: how injustice exists changeably rather than inevitably, politically rather than metaphysically - how our lives could have been different. Critical analysis tells us, colloquially speaking, not just what's wrong but also what we can do practically to respond. Complaint, in contrast, tells us what's wrong - unjust, racist, manipulated, sexist, and so on - but tells us nothing new about how the world can be otherwise, how we can change the world, resist injustice, do justice. ~ John Forester

Life has its share of joys and laughter - but we also know life's road is often very rough. Temptations assail us; people disappoint us; illness and age weaken us; tragedies and sorrows ambush us; evil and injustice overpower us. Life is hard - but God is good, and heaven is real! ~ Billy Graham

In every country where there is a vicious oppression, a peaceful and a continuous civil disobedience is the magical door opening to the freedom! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him….I didn't have to know how He was going to save the unlettered and the unbaptized, or how He would redeem the conscientious heathen who had never spoken His name. I didn't have to know how my gay friends would find their way to Redemption or how my hardworking secular humanist friends could or would receive the power of His Saving Grace. I didn't have to know why good people suffered agony or died in pain. He knew. And it was his knowing that overwhelmed me… ~ Anne Rice

Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions is increased by the sympathy of a multitude. But enthusiasm is only a temporary state of Religion, and whilst it lasts will hardly be seen with pleasure at the helm. Even in its coolest state, it has been much oftener a motive to oppression than a restraint from it. ~ James Madison

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

America and its allies are engaged in a war against a terrorist movement that spans all corners of the globe. It is sparked by radical ideologues that breed hatred, oppression, and violence against all of their declared enemies. ~ Kenny Marchant

In discarding the monkey and substituting man, our Father in Heaven did the monkey an undeserved injustice. ~ Mark Twain

I had a long talk with my dear Fat Mary that night, because I had many questions. Could someone actually be beaten to death by such a nun? Did Mother Rufina, the new Superior, know that Sister Clotilda was so cruel? Who let her work with children? Could nuns go to hell?
Fat Mary told me she didn't know the answers to my questions, but she reminded me that it was her role to take my worries and burdens and keep them for me until a time when I could understand them. ~ Maria Nhambu

Most people will not stand up to injustice unless their comfort of living is severely threatened. This is because today's man does not care for the outside world so long as he has a roof over his head and four walls to contain his own. ~ Suzy Kassem

A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn't find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to this world - this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me. ~ Haruki Murakami