Oppression Olympics Quotes

We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation. We need to be able to argue beyond the threat of privilege. We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we'll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference. We should be able to say, "This is my truth," and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. Because at some point, doesn't privilege become beside the point? ~ Roxane Gay

My problems aren't invalid. Not to me. Just because they aren't life altering, life-threatening, doesn't mean they don't make me feel bad. I wake up with them every morning, carry them around all day like a lead backpack, and I fall asleep with them at night. They're real, and they're mine. I know I'm lucky. I know that. But it doesn't change how I feel. ~ Rachel Harrison

Oppression Olympics is what smart liberal Americans say to make you feel stupid and to make you shut up. But there IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities - blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Jews - all get shit from white folks, different kinds of shit but shit still. Each secretly believes that it gets the worst shit. So, no, there is no United League of the Oppressed. However, all the others think they're better than blacks because, well, they're not black. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The festive music died down and the granite pillars were replaced with rotted wooden beams as he continued down the alleyways. The scent of fresh flowers turned to mold, and the colorful mosiacs of honor and nobility were nonexistent. Run-down tenements were shadowed by its surrounding buildings, as if the capital itself wanted to conceal its existence. ~ Evan Meekins

I will never be satisfied, like the Olympics. ~ Li Ka-shing

Sometimes their oppression of emotion and the weird way it comes out is more interesting than painting it in bold primary colors. ~ Edward Norton

After centuries of marginalization and neglect, we need to cast our own movements, projects, and ideas as a battle for relevancy in the face of historical manipulation, exploitation, and oppression. We need to fight, tooth and nail, for equity in all areas of social life. One point to make clear, ethnic and racial minorities are not looking for scraps or a handout from the old paternalistic system but an equitable, stable, and leveled playing field. ~ Martin Guevara Urbina

From the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement? ~ J.M. Coetzee

Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression. ~ Malcolm X

These my two hands / quick to slap my face / before others could slap it. ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

As an economic doctrine it does not stand up to scientific probing. Marx's economic theories are not a scientific account of the nature and extent of exploitation under capitalism. They nevertheless offer a vivid picture of an uncontrolled society in which the productive workers unconsciously create the instruments of their own oppression. It is a picture of human alienation, writ large as the dominance of past labour, or capital, over living labour. ~ Anonymous

Here Mankind is not governed by the rules of reason, stupid and strict, but by the heart and intuition. The people do not indulge in idle chatter, parading what they know, but create remarkable things by applying their imagination. The state ceases to impose the shackles of daily oppression, but helps people to realize their hopes and dreams. And Man is not just a cog in the system, not just playing a role, but a free Creature. That's what was passing through my mind, making my bed-rest almost a pleasure.

Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them. ~ Emily Bronte

Revolution is not for the faint of heart. It is for monsters. You have to lose who you are to discover what you can become. ~ Antonio Negri; Michael Hardt

I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation. ~ Theodore Bikel

[The myth of the absolutizing of ignorance] implies the existence of someone who decrees the ignorance of someone else. The one who is doing the decreeing defines himself and the class to which he belongs as those who know or were born to know; he thereby defines others as alien entities. The words of his own class come to be the "true" words, which he imposes or attempts to impose on the others: the oppressed, whose words have been stolen from them. Those who steal the words of others develop a deep doubt in the abilities of the others and consider them incompetent. Each time they say their word without hearing the word of those whom they have forbidden to speak, they grow more accustomed to power and acquire a taste for guiding, ordering, and commanding. They can no longer live without having someone to give orders to. Under these circumstances, dialogue is impossible. ~ Paulo Freire

What does our commitment to nonviolence mean as citizens of one of the most powerful and oppressive nations in recorded history? ~ Mary Jo Bowman

I frowned at the list. So ... I'll go back and tell the Traynors that I'm going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics - ~ Jojo Moyes

Resolutions mean willpower, willpower means achievement, achievement means success and failure, and the whole sequence means losing an appreciation of the gift. I have learned two sure things in the struggle between my desire for love and the oppression of my attachments. The first is that God is absolutely trustworthy. The second is that resolutions are absolutely not. ~ Gerald G. May

We live in a world of wars and wars alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you'll notice one curious fact about them, they all suffer, they all die, and sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most. ~ Frederick Lenz

WHEN I finally slowed and looked around, I saw with amazement I'd trotted sixteen blocks in about three minutes. Summer Olympics, here I come. Assuming they held the races at night. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

Believer, your life is too essential to waste on pettiness or word wars, greed or ladder climbing, anger or bitterness, fear or anxiety, regret or disappointment. Life is too short. We must run, not walk, the way of Isaiah 58, embracing authentic faith manifested through mercy and community. Living on mission requires nothing less. It is a grand adventure, a true voyage into the kingdom of God. Would you lose days, months, years pointing fingers and quarreling, or would you rather break yokes of oppression? Imagine what would happen if we all chose the latter. ~ Jen Hatmaker

My real goal is the Olympics. It's going to be tough but it was very good preparation to play here. ~ Anastasia Myskina

Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman's hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes. ~ CrimethInc.

At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: "When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you." And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and my soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe. ~ Frantz Fanon

Saying, "I don't agree with you," or going so far as to say, "I think your belief structure is childish," does not amount to persecution. Insensitivity is not the same as harassment or oppression. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well. ~ Pierre De Coubertin

This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

However, after 1930 Liddell never competed again in public in a major athletic meeting. Did he ever regret missing the 1928 Olympics and the chance of winning at least another gold medal? Did he lament trading fame and glory for a life of obscurity and hardship? He gave clear and unequivocal answers to these questions when interviewed in Canada at the end of his first furlough in 1932. 'Are you glad you gave your life to missionary work? Don't you miss the limelight, the rush, the frenzy, the cheers, the rich red wine of victory?' probed the interviewer in rather florid prose. 'Oh well, of course it's natural for a chap to think over all that sometimes,' replied Liddell. 'But I'm glad I'm at the work I'm engaged in now. A fellow's life counts for far more for this than the other. Not a corruptible crown, but an incorruptible one, you know. ~ Julian Wilson

Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Arnold's notion of the intellectual as disinterested critic distinguished him from both Marx and Hegel. For Marx, the proper function of the intellectual was to be a partisan on behalf of the proletariat, criticizing bourgeois society for its fundamental, structural oppression. For Hegel, the role of the intellectual was to stand above particular group interests, and to bring to consciousness the ethical basis of modern, capitalist society, in the process creating standards by which to guide politics and culture. Arnold's conception of "aliens" has obvious affinities with this Hegelian image of the intellectual. But "disinterestedness" for Arnold had a rather different meaning. It implied the ability to free oneself from partisanship, to take a distanced enough view to be able to criticize the side of the issue to which one had been committed, as circumstances required. "Living by ideas" he wrote, means that "when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all around you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other--still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question..." The role of the intellectual, then, was to embody and encourage that quality of mind that allowed individuals to get some distance from their social, political, and economic milieu; to reflect critically, ~ Jerry Z. Muller

The Olympics are coming ... and it's a big problem in American politics, because the problem with holding the Olympics this fall is that we're all going to be focused on the Olympics, and it makes that window of opportunity for Gore to win the election that much smaller. ~ Susan Estrich

They want the Olympics. We ought to make sure they don't get the Olympics. ~ George Nethercutt

Predictions are predictions. If you could predict the stock market, you would be super rich. But I have to race the race. It doesn't matter what I've done over the last few years. I have to race at the Olympics. ~ Mark De Jonge

If I rule out violent anarchism, there remains pacifist, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, moral, and anti-democratic anarchism (i.e., that which is hostile to the falsified democracy of bourgeois states). There remains the anarchism which acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves. ~ Jacques Ellul

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

We are opposed to all cruelty, so as advocates of non-violence, opponents of oppression, people who abhor the cruelty inherent in slaughtering we say the only ethical way to consume flesh is to pick up the carcass of an animal who has died naturally or been killed accidentally, say by being hit by a car, and eat that. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

Poverty, oppression, grief and depression will increase, if a country does not live according to the rules of God. ~ Sunday Adelaja

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

States that are built on a religious foundation limit their own people in a circle of faith and fear. ~ Raif Badawi

I bowled a 129. It's like- It was like the Special Olympics. ~ Barack Obama

I'm not the athlete I was when I was training for the Olympics in '92 or when I was working out every single day. I have to live in moderation: I work out three or four days a week, and I smile while I'm working out - I really do enjoy it. I work out with my girlfriends and make it a social competition. ~ Summer Sanders