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Oppression Quotes

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Oppression Quotes

“A human, caught under the oppression of a foreign nation in his/her own country, can be willingly to risk his/her life in order to achieve freedom. To call this act a self-sacrifice, one would have to presume that the person didn’t mind living as a slave of the British. The selfishness of a person who is willing to die, if necessary, fighting for his/her freedom, lies in the fact that he/she is unwilling to go on living in a world where he/she is no longer able to act on his/her own rules and regulations, that is, a world where rudimentary human conditions of existence are no longer possible.”

FreedomIndependenceSlaveryOppressionPatriotismNationalismFreedom FighterFighting For Freedom
Book:Prescription: Treating India's Soul
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“The wall rose high above us in the night, illimitable and fearsome. If we could just get across it, then we would be all right; I knew it deep in my bones. But for the moment it stood between us and our escape, and I was as frightened of it as I had been of the Volstov dragons. It was on the same scale and, beyond that, it meant just as much- a cruel, stark metaphor, the symbol of oppression. And yet it was only a wall.”

FearWallMetaphorOppressionEscapeWalls
Book:Shadow Magic
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“The social justice facade converts the underlying theme of transgressive sex into a heroic tale of dismantling oppression. Somehow it's worked. Relatively few parents and teachers have revolted, considering what's being promoted. A startling number seem to believe they are heroes for actively participating.”

ChildrenSexSocial JusticeGenderSexualityOppressionParentsTransgenderGender IdentityGender Ideology
Book:Sacrificial Lambs: A Liberal Reporter Exposes How the Progressive Left Harms Children in the Name of Gender Ideology
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“Religion, which was obviously created to give meaning and purpose to people, has become part of the oppression. This is true in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were all revolutionaries who critiqued and attempted to dismantle the corrupt societal traditions of their time. Yet their teachings, like most things in human society, have been distorted and co-opted by the confused and power-hungry patriarchal tradition. What were wonce the creation myths of ancient cultures, have become doctrines of oppression. More blood has been spilled and more people oppressed in the name of religion than for any other reason in history.”

WarReligionJesusBloodTraditionCorruptionOppressionMuhammadCulturesRevolutionaries
Book:Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
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“If self-hatred was hammered into you when you were young, Major wants you to know that you're important - that being an outsider helps you develop skin that's both tough and pliable in social situations. You are a stronger person because of the shit you've gone through.”

ResilienceOppressionSelf AcceptanceSelf HatredInternalised Oppression
Book:Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary
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“Equality of condition and equality of opportunity must provide the foundation of an interdependent nation with building blocks found in dignity and respect given to every American, regardless of socioeconomic status.”

Social JusticePrivilegeOppressionSolidaritySociologyPolitical ScienceCommon GroundPower DynamicsStructural InequalitiesUniversal Human Rights
Book:Critical Masses: Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Decides
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“Lightness and weightiness are both linked to a philosophy of life. They are choices in life. Heaviness can be the embodiment of a sense of responsibility, the expression of maturity, the result of profound meditation or the emanation of a search for meaning in life. Weightiness, however, may also lead to a feeling of oppression, when it is felt as a burden, an unbearable burden. Then time has come to let loose and things can finally lose their gravity. ( "The unbearable heaviness of being" )”

LifePhilosophyChoicesResponsibilityMeditationBurdenOppressionMeaningMaturityGravityLightnessHeavinessWeightinessLet Loose
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“Non-being, i.e., distance from society—social distance—is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white. For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?”

PoetrySocietyPoemOppressionMarginalizedMarginalized PeopleKarensOppressed People
Book:Call Us What We Carry
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“[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova] In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness. For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth. Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

LoveLifeHappinessDeathSufferingHopeBeautyWifeViolenceAtheismYouthTrue LoveAtheistOppressionCommunismEnjoymentMaterialismSovietTendernessMarxismMagnanimityRed ArmyDialectical MaterialismMaterialistProletarianRevolutionistIrreconcilable AtheismIrreconcilable Atheist
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”

PoliticsSocietyFeminismCapitalismOppressionIdeologyImperialismDominationRadical Feminism
Book:Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
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“Gradually, human societies started extricating themselves from the worst forms of oppression. Human sacrifice and deified rulers went out of fashion. Slavery was outlawed, and privileges were taken away from nobles. Human societies regained much of the lost ground. We are still not as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers --there are the poor and the billionaires-- but we are much better off than we were during the days of god-kings.”

ReligionSocietyCivilizationOppressionRulersHierarchyMonarchyIdeologyon
Book:Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth
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“So selfish. Chen Kaizong's first response upon hearing the elder's soliloquy was disgust. He knew very well how people were exploited and oppressed. This was a common theme throughout history: take any group of people- it didn't matter if they were of different races or compatriots- some always set themselves apart as a higher class, and, in the name of gods, the nation, or 'progress,' made laws and constructed rules that allowed them to dominate the lives of the other classes, to own their bodies as well as their spirits.”

SocietyOppressionExploitationHierachy
Book:Waste Tide
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“When a beast invades your house and starts abusing your loved ones, would you sit back waiting for the authorities to intervene - you may, but I can't - I won't - for me family and society are one, and when wild animals run rampant abusing that family of mine, I would die defending my family, not sit back like a spineless coward.”

ActionJusticeInjusticeTyrannyDiscriminationOppressionStand UpInhumanitySavagerySpeak Up
Book:Revolution Indomable
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“The perspiration of kings is just froth of the decanter. But the pawis of peasants dries up, becomes lead that weighs them down the ages. The master wears a necktie; the slave, a grindstone. Between them no relationship is possible except that which exists between mill and grist. And what is private property without public toil? Yet the world perpetuates only the pyramids, only their pharaohs. Nobody remembers or even likes to admit that both came into existence only through brawn and blood that issued from millions upon millions of nameless serfs. You weep over sunken armadas but not over their galleon slaves. You weep over fallen crowns, not for those beheaded. This must stop! We shall stop you! Labor has a face, labor has a name! You don’t romanticize it. . . you feed its belly . . . heal its sores and sons. All written history glorifies the power of men, not the sweat of man. . . . All this feudal nonsense about lilac-strewn palaces and Cleopatra’s bath! Well, the new chronicle will smell as the tao smells. It shall be carpenter over architect, farmer over agrarianist, citizen over president....”

HistoryLaborPropertyOppressionInequalityExploitationPeasantsClass StruggleSlavesFeudalism
Book:But for the Lovers
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“James Madison framed the constitutional order so that power would be in the hands of the Senate, which represents “the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable sett of men,” who have respect for property owners and their rights and understand the need for government “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”—though it was not long before he came to deplore “the daring depravity of the times,” as the “stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the government—at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations” (1792).”

HistoryDemocracyCapitalismCorruptionOppressionInequalityAmerican HistoryAmerican PoliticsRich PeopleJames Madison
Book:Hopes and Prospects
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“Microaggressions are not trivial and insignificant but have a continuing and oftentimes harmful macro impact. Those in the majority group, those with power and privilege, and those who do not experience microaggressions are privileged to enjoy the luxury of availing for proof. Meanwhile, people of color, LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and other socially devalued groups continue to be harmed and oppressed. To ask them to wait for individual, institutional, and societal change is to ask them to continue to suffer in silence and to maintain the status quo of power and privilege.”

RacismPrejudiceDiscriminationOppressionInequalityMicroaggressionMicroaggressionsPower And PrivilegeRacial Microaggression
Author:Derald Wing Sue
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“Western capitalist society, and especially my own American society, is one characterized by great inequalities. In any such society, by the nature of the case, the greatest threat to rightful freedom is always the wealth and power of the privileged. The chief task of the state in protecting human freedom should always be to use rightful state coercion to limit the freedom of the powerful and privileged to infringe the rightful freedom of the less privileged and the vulnerable. Political struggles in the modern world are usually fundamentally struggles about whether state power will be used to protect the rightful freedom of all, or instead used to protect the wrongful freedom of the wealthy, powerful, and privileged. Wide social inequality necessarily indicates that these struggles have come out the wrong way, on behalf of the unjust and oppressive freedom of the privileged against the rightful freedom of the majority.”

FreedomOppressionInequalityCoercionWealth InequalitySocial InequalityState Power
Book:The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy
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“They [feminists] share the instinct for tyranny and destruction - and they are filled with self-loathing. In the end, leftist feminists yearn to submit to, and submerge themselves within, a despotic monolith. Because they despise their own society and are bent on its destruction, they cannot concede that adversarial cultures may be more evil, because that would legitimize their own host society - and they can't allow that. It would rob them of the moral indignation -- and the identity of being victims -- that lies at the foundation of their politics of hate.”

PoliticsFeminismDestructionTyrannyOppressionLeft WingFeministsLeftistVictim Politics
Author:Jamie Glazov
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“The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.”

ViolenceFeminismOppression
Author:Andrea Dworkin
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