Top 131 Oppression Quotes

I certainly know about the oppression and prejudices of being black and a woman and from the South.

With shame be it spoken: by her fall, the Church’s liberties have been sacrificed for the sake of temporal advantages. The road to her ruin lay through the sinuous paths of riches: she has been prostituted in the streets to princes; she has conceived iniquity and will bring forth oppression to the undeserving.

America is just the country that how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Does the global Left – as well as the Israeli Left – truly not care about the horrific Taliban regime, the terrible oppression of women in Gulf states, and the mass hanging festivals in Iran?

We definitely experience racism in England and different levels of oppression as well. Anywhere affected by colonialism there’s certain kinds of race relations and class relations going on.

The more that I learn about what’s going on, it’s really hard to ignore the oppression that people are actually going through.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me state that I hate Hamas. They embody everything that I, as a human being, am fighting against: oppression, religious rule, and patriarchy. They empower Israel while dividing the Palestinians.

When you have increasing power of religious groups, oppression of women increases. Women are oppressed in all religions.

Still, corruption and oppression are far too common threats to the democratic society.

Life experiences with oppression and homophobia often become internalized and can have detrimental effects on the development of positive sexual identity for Southern black gay men.

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.

Before the palefaces came among us, we enjoyed the happiness of unbounded freedom and were acquainted with neither riches, wants, nor oppression.

Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.

Anyone who thinks they stand apart from society and defies all which govern its existence has less in common with the lone wolf patriot standing up to dystopic forces of oppression – a myth – and more in common with the disease known as cancer – a harsh reality.

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

The regressive Left ranks minority groups in a pecking order to compete in a kind of ‘Oppression Olympics.’ Gold medal goes to the most offended.

The present Arab uprising didn’t stem from Israel. The old guard is trying to keep down the young chickens. The old guard is better organized. They may win elections, but unless they have a solution to poverty, to corruption, to oppression, they will not last. I am with the young people.

How clear can I put this? I am not denying female oppression; I am trying to stop it by calling for a more fluid masculinity.

The left takes credit for being the political aisle promoting human rights and fighting oppression, but in the case of Cuba, its adherents promoted oppression and human rights abuses for decades by glorifying the Castro regime and its savage enforcer, Che Guevara.

Together we have travelled a long road to be where we are today. This has been a road of struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

Churchill the right-winger has been elevated to a status where you can’t criticise him. People from the time remember him as an imperialist, a hard-right politician, very instrumental in the oppression of Ireland and the attempt to defeat the general strike.

I just don’t believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

Maybe there’s less oppression growing up in a small village, and fewer rules, and less danger.

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.

There is no doubt that Iraqis, like Australians and Americans, love and desire freedom. However, if freedom doesn’t mean the right to complete self-determination, unfettered by interests other than one’s own, then that freedom is less than worthless – it’s oppression.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.

Religion is a tool to stamp out oppression, repression, and tyranny. It’s to save the oppressed. That’s what religion is for.

I go to see films at the multiplex because they are not good films, and so I don’t have to think about things like death, social oppression, or yes, my fertility, while I watch them.

Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.

We have to continue to empower each other… we do not have to live in this marginalisation, we do not have to live in oppression, but our fight to get out of it is not going to be an easy one.

No force, oppression, imprisonment, jail… nothing will stop me.

The people of Nicaragua were suffering oppression. This made us develop an awareness which eventually led us to commit ourselves to the struggle against the domination of the capitalists of our country in collusion with the U.S. government, i.e. imperialism.

A vote for George Wallace is a vote for the past and oppression.

If we’d lived in England or America we’d have told stories abut our lives and nobody would have called it protest theatre. But the reality of South Africa was the arrests and detentions and oppression – we could not escape that, so we decided to take it on.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.

While women across the globe have many differences – language, culture, environment – our similarities are undeniable, and the impact of abuse and oppression affects us all.

There are a lot of leaders that talk about ending things like oppression – whether it’s discrimination or getting a job – but the reason for all of this stuff is somebody’s making a profit off our backs. That’s the reason why black people were brought here in the first place. It was a profit motive.

It’s a controversial issue: many feminists reasonably worry that by taking the concentration off gender as an independent locus of oppression, we dilute the strength of a women’s movement, or of women’s rights advocacy.

I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

Peace along with freedom and justice are the pillars for attaining both security and stability and will pave the way towards the eradication of oppression, extremism, and terrorism in our world.

We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can’t drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn’t wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies.

The struggle to conquer oppression in our country is the weaker for the traditionalist, conservative, and primitive restraints imposed on women by man-dominated structures within our movement, as also because of equally traditionalist attitudes of surrender and submission on the part of women.

I didn’t run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

I feel like I would be a hypocrite not to use my platform to speak up for people who are facing oppression in this country. I did it and I still do it because I believe it’s worth letting people know that if we do this together, if we stand up together we can make change.

Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

To me, it is one world, and the non-human animals bear the brunt of oppression and suffering.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

Oppression is not limited to people of color, but if you feel guilty that’s something you should confront.

No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.

The fact that apartheid has been tied up with white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and deliberate oppression makes the problem much more complex. Material want is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.

Well, when you think about it black American culture evolved over three and a half centuries. Every minute under which they lived under oppression and they adapted to dealing with the fact that those freedoms were going to be cut off. They had to somehow make a life within all of those restriction, and they did.

You can be poor, middle class, or rich – it doesn’t matter. The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you’ve never been oppressed. Flash the black card, and most white people will cower.

I like to be able to raise people’s consciousness, yes. And to remind that those of us involved in the receiving end of the oppression, we have a duty.

In the final analysis, the incident is seen as originating from an emotional expression of the frustration and anger of the proud people of China who had been subject to ever increasing oppression from without and decadent corruption from within.

War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.

Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression.

It’s my luck to be at the frontier of what looks to be a resurrection of roots music on the international scene. That’s really what reggae music is about: that voice against oppression and struggle.

Rights compliance helps effective outcomes, it does not hinder them. That should come as no surprise because the ‘human rights’ in the Human Rights Act are the rights adopted in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war, and are designed to protect all of us from oppression.

Oppression thrives on distance – on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

In recent years, we have seen the United States back away from pressuring the Castro regime, under the misguided view that placating them with an open hand would yield progress. That naivete has invited only more cruelty and oppression in return.

Rap’s conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

In a world without the law of God, you have chaos, oppression, tyranny, and everyone doing what is right in their own eyes.

Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.

In 1559, Duke Frederick III was summoned before the Emperor Ferdinand I at Breslau to answer the accusations of extravagance and oppression brought against him by the Silesian Estates and was deposed, imprisoned, and his son Henry XI given the Ducal crown instead.

Wealth is being generated off the back of oppression and abuse.

The world is indebted for all triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

I am always revolted when Islamic leaders, from Afghanistan or elsewhere, deny the very existence of female oppression, avoid the issue by pointing to examples of what they view as Western mistreatment of women, or even worse, justify the oppression of women on the basis of notions derived from Sharia law.

In Venezuela, we either accept domination, total oppression and torture… from Maduro’s regime, or we choose freedom, democracy, and prosperity for our people.

‘Between Shades of Gray’ is a story of astonishing force. I feel grateful for a writer like Ruta Sepetys who bravely tells the hard story of what happens to the innocent when world leaders and their minions choose hate and oppression. Beautiful and unforgettable.

Somehow, I realized I could write books about black characters who reflected my own experiences or otherworldly experiences – not just stories of history, poverty and oppression.

False riches, consisting of money, houses and lands, acquired by selfish means at cost to others and thereafter used selfishly, are almost always used for the oppression of other persons.

The oppression is like nothing imaginable – I literally believed that Kim Jong-il could read my mind.

Any kind of civil rights oppression is wrong.

I think often the West does not understand the history and the privilege of wearing a hijab. They always think of oppression.

Even a cursory run through American history shows exceptionalism has been used to justify bloodshed, oppression, and profit.

We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure.

Albanians are a nation of freedom fighters who know something about living under oppression.

Illicit trade corrupts corporations and governments alike, allows dictators to survive, and obscures oppression, including modern day slavery.

I think up to the 1990s, there were a lot of political commentaries in our films… on oppression and women empowerment.

Sadly, the Left is no longer liberal at all, for it has traded in individualism for collectivism, thus placing us into an oppression Olympics where victimhood is a virtue. This post-modernism – this cultural Marxism or whatever you want to call it – can only destroy; it cannot create.

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

A lot of the work I’ve been doing on camera has been me speaking on trans issues and illuminating things in a comedic way. That isn’t the focus of my personal art, I guess, but it’s a privilege for any artist to get to make stuff that isn’t just about their oppression or strife or struggle.

When there is oppression and dictatorship, by not speaking out, we lose our dignity.

Poverty was my mother’s midwife. She had her children in poverty. But she also found a road to bring us a sense of purpose, and she taught us how to be valiant in the face of oppression.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

Peace does not mean just to stop wars, but also to stop oppression and injustice.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

There is just so much hurt, disappointment, and oppression one can take… The line between reason and madness grows thinner.

You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.

We’re used to saying that women in other cultures are oppressed, but the question that I had when making the film was: Isn’t the objectification of a woman’s body that we often see in Western culture another kind of oppression?

As American Jews and descendants of immigrants, we never forget where our families came from or what members of our community experienced. Because we remember, we look out for those who are freeing persecution, oppression, and danger.

Racism has two primary functions: the oppression of people of color, which most people recognize, but also the simultaneous elevation of white people. You can’t hold one group down without lifting the other up.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

The situation in the region is flammable and may explode at any moment, because of the crucial events and because of the absence of justice in executing the international legitimacy resolutions, regarding the Israeli Arab cause and the oppression on Palestinians by Israelis.

Our freedoms are shared freedoms: they are bound up in each other. The ability to confront oppression in the guise of religion is linked to our ability to worship as we choose: both are acts of expression.

A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

Due to hate, fear, and oppression, the North Koreans cannot help themselves.

Each and every life that has fled communism has proven how the will to pursue democracy and freedom, even in the face of oppression, can never be suppressed or silenced.

The Enlightenment attacked religion – Christianity, mainly – for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance.

For all of the continued awareness of systemic violence and oppression, there isn’t a lot of talk about that psychological toll of racism, at least in white circles and white media.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

It really is systematic oppression that is so deeply ingrained into the very fabric of American society… Shedding a light on it, in whatever way possible, is the only way to create change.

It’s a stereotype that Jews run Hollywood. Guess what? It’s true. Jews do run Hollywood. It’s a stereotype that many Jews are wealthy. Guess what? Many Jews are wealthy. And there’s nothing objectionable in the image. What’s unflattering about Jews rising out of oppression and poverty and making it to big success?

Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

I think about freedom as not only as the absence of oppression but also the presence of justice and joy.

As a social concept, ‘white’ is profound in its meaning. It means people who either come from or appear to come from Europe, but it’s necessarily a construct of oppression.

Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like.

Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity’s nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

If you think about it, hip-hop came out of nothing. It was a response to oppression.

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It’s oppression.

I have always and will always stand on behalf of justice and do not condone oppression in any form.

I’m concerned about – the oppression of the poor.

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.

With abolition, it’s necessary to destroy systems of oppression. But it’s equally necessary to put at the forefront our conversations about creation. When we fight for justice, what exactly do we want for our communities?

Being black in America – especially as I was growing up – the feeling of oppression, the feeling of being outcast, the feeling of not having a voice was part of my life.

It’s not new to attempt to vilify the minority that speaks about their oppression. That’s not a new thing.

As I grew older and got into the late teens and early 20s, I wanted to be a voice of the people. You know, getting locked up all the time and going through so much oppression and seeing it all around myself, I wanted to be a voice for it.

Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression.

Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may.

As attorney general of Missouri, I am my state’s chief law enforcement officer. I swore an oath to uphold the rule of law, and that means fighting violence and oppression wherever it exists, especially violence against the poor and vulnerable.

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

There has been no persecution I have not tasted, no oppression I have not suffered. I neither care for Paradise nor fear Hell. If I see my nation’s belief secured, I will not even care about burning in Hell, for while my body is burning, my heart will be as if in a rose garden.