Top 70 Repression Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Repression Quotes from famous people such as William Allen White, Tawakkol Karman, David Levering Lewis, Barkha Dutt, Germaine Greer, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.
William Allen White
I have always believed that resistance against repression and violence is possible without relying on similar repression and violence. I have always believed that human civilization is the fruit of the effort of both women and men.
Tawakkol Karman
The education business is a little murky because by 1900, it has been pretty well decided that a certain amount of education was required to make the system of repression work. You had to have people who showed up punctually. You had to have people who took their orders obediently and understand them fully.
David Levering Lewis
Yes, fear and repression may be permanent citizens in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat.
Barkha Dutt
Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you’re just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.
Germaine Greer
The love of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy is reliant on the restrictions of Regency culture, their passion is created by repression.
Sara Pascoe
The gospel is not a philosophy of repression, as so many regard it. It is a plan of freedom that gives discipline to appetite and direction to behavior.
Gordon B. Hinckley
When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out.
Abbie Hoffman
When you have a foreign invasion – in this case by the Indonesian army – writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.
Antonio Tabucchi
The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation’s dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates.
George Jackson
I will not ascribe to the ‘Blame America’ club for vicious abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cuban labor, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship.
Bob Menendez
The machine of repression can only be started, it can’t be stopped – even by Putin.
Ksenia Sobchak
Father John Misty is rebelling not against repression or foolishness but the ephemeral nature of mankind. He seeks permanence in a fleeting age, and he does not find it because the one place he could find an answer, he considers closed off: a locked door.
Ben Domenech
I couldn’t have imagined that I would live long enough to see Egypt emancipated from decades of repression.
Mohamed ElBaradei
My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression – thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.
Noam Chomsky
At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
Salman Rushdie
Here’s the broader inconvenient truth for both Clinton and women’s rights that Trump is more than willing to tell voters: Islam, as it is practiced in most countries around the world, suppresses women’s rights – the only issue is the degree of severity of the repression.
Peter Navarro
It’s ironic that socialism and similar left-wing ideas appeal to people who fashion themselves as ‘anti-establishment,’ when you can’t have socialism without political repression.
Dan Bongino
1819 was a year of hunger, mass unemployment, political repression and murderous, state-sanctioned violence.
David Olusoga
Franschhoek Valley was, in recent memory, a simple place with some notable vineyards and two or three streets of Victorian cottages and a few older, thatched houses. The valley was settled early in the 1680s by Huguenots fleeing repression.
Justin Cartwright
Pop music is created by repression – and then the system takes it and makes even more money with it!
Michel Gondry
Growing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic – those are sort of three layers of repression.
Paul Rust
We all live under some repression; we have to, it’s part of the deal.
Daniel Day-Lewis
Repression and intimidation are not – and never should be – the acceptable companions of reform.
Jamal Khashoggi
It was this society and culture that among other things – including economic opportunities here and repression in Europe – attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country.
Samuel P. Huntington
And the young people in the 1960’s identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.
George Martin
The onset of mania occurs when repression is no longer able to resist the assaults of the repressed instincts.
Karl Abraham
Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.
Ronald Reagan
We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We’re focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.
Amor Towles
NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.
Fidel Castro
Repression is the enemy of civilization - so keep dream

Repression is the enemy of civilization – so keep dreaming, because the dreams we dream today will provide the love, the compassion, and the humanity that will narrate the stories of our lives tomorrow.
Marc Platt
I love ‘The Master And Margarita’ by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.
Fiona Bruce
We’re trying to challenge the gangs, not by repression, but by competing to get the young people to our side.
Nayib Bukele
I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.
Bobby Sands
Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these in turn had supported him in the heat of abolitionism. But the atmosphere changed to one of repression after the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Darryl Pinckney
Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.
Hilary Mantel
At the moment of greatest love, there is greatest fear, and at the moment of enormous repression, there is resistance, and therefore a chance at revolutionary change.
Kerry Kennedy
The Government of Iraq also owes a debt to the American and coalition forces who are fighting the insurgency and helping put that country back together after decades of repression.
Ike Skelton
Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters.
Fidel Castro
As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.
Angela Davis
I’ve never really subscribed to the theory that repression breeds rebellion. I don’t think that’s really true.
Boots Riley
To write is a relief from life’s problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.
Mario Vargas Llosa
When we were in the Dark Ages, it was a question of humanity somehow managing to forget about itself. We put God in the centre of society, and people forgot about their own nature and desires. There was a huge deal of repression.
Shakira
Palestinian terrorism has to be rejected and condemned, yes. But it should not be translated defacto into a policy of support for a really increasingly brutal repression, colonial settlements and a new wall.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Knife crime isn’t an issue that’s going to go away just because of repression and police action. Of course we need to support the forces, but it’s linked to prevention, and prevention often comes through education.
Vincent Kompany
Repression is fantastic.
Courteney Cox
Religion is an easy target for accusations of repression and misogyny, but achievement in the sacred and therefore socio-political sphere was often an option for women, thanks not to brawn, but to brain.
Bettany Hughes
It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion – something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.
Alice Miller
There’s a repression against mothers where we’re expected to be full-time workers and pretend we’re not mothers, and then expected to be full-time mothers who pretend we’re not working. Simultaneously, within the hours of the week that exist.
Catherine Reitman
Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.
Wendy Kopp
Hemingway’s minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn’t realize they were supposed to have imagined.
Madison Smartt Bell
So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history – and history of repression.
Phillip Noyce
It’s a shame – we’ve got so many hilarious women, and think there’s a certain repression there.
Emily Atack
The biggest lie in the world is in answer to the question, ‘How are you?’ People usually say, ‘I’m fine,’ but that’s mostly bull. Everyone wants to display being perfect. They tell themselves and their friends, ‘I drive this car, I own this house, I’m fine.’ People ball up into these tight wads of repression.
Brittany Howard
The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel, even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.
Conrad Black