Oppression Quotes
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The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. (Quote by - Albert Einstein)
The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery. (Quote by - Sir Winston Churchill)
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives. (Quote by - Robert A. Heinlein)
Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history. (Quote by - A. J. P. Taylor)
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. (Quote by - George Orwell)
We find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. (Quote by - Simmons v. U.S.)
When the state intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine. (Quote by - Bertrand Russell)
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission. (Quote by - Simone Weil)
Trust not in oppression, and become not vain in robbery: if riches increase, set not your heart upon them. (Quote by - Bible)
Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing. (Quote by - Oliver Tambo)
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. (Quote by - Margaret Sanger)
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. (Quote by - A. Whitney Griswold)
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. (Quote by - Benjamin Franklin)
My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time. (Quote by - Garrison Keillor)
The wise learn many things from their enemies. (Quote by - Aristophanes)
In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence. (Quote by - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Freedom is not worth living if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that previous right. (Quote by - Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi)
The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it. (Quote by - Dr. Joseph Mengele)
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. (Quote by - Simone Weil)
Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. (Quote by - Heinrich Heine)
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul. (Quote by - Michel De Montaigne)
Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole. (Quote by - Adolf Hitler)
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. (Quote by - James Madison)
Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. (Quote by - Robert Francis Kennedy)
Obvious and inexorable oppression that cannot be overcome does not give rise to revolt but to submission. (Quote by - Simone Weil)
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. (Quote by - Abraham Lincoln)
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. (Quote by - Kenny Marchant)
When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone. (Quote by - George O'Neil)
Each person will have a registered number, without which he will not be allowed to buy or sell; and there will be one universal world church. Anyone who refuses to take part in this universal system will have no right to exist. (Quote by - Dr. Kurt E. Koch)
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. (Quote by - Amir Butler)
No one is fit to be trusted with power. ... No one. ... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. ... And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate. (Quote by - C. P. Snow)
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate. (Quote by - Eric Hoffer)
That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression. (Quote by - Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35)
Society's needs come before the individual's needs. (Quote by - Adolf Hitler)
I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end. (Quote by - Albert Schweitzer)
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. (Quote by - Rita Dove)
Control does not come from strong police forces, does not come from oppression and repression, does not come from violating people's rights or giving the security systems undue powers, (Quote by - Hanan Ashrawi)
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. (Quote by - Steven Biko)
The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts -- wets, drys, and hypocrites. (Quote by - Florence Sabin)
Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it. (Quote by - Howard Mumford Jones)
If the opposition (citizen) disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves. (Quote by - Josef Stalin)
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 both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. (Quote by - Frederick Douglass)
To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads -- such is the behavior of the multitude. (Quote by - Mencius)
We simply do not catch a high enough percentage of users to make the law a real threat, although we do catch enough to seriously overburden our legal system. (Quote by - Jackson Eli Reynolds)
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)
It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright. (Quote by - Murray N. Rothbard)
The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement. (Quote by - William Pitt)
We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice / however much we might desire it. (Quote by - Hubert H. Humphrey)
People crushed by law have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous... (Quote by - Edmund Burke)
During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power. (Quote by - Edward Alsworth Ross)
If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, political cleansing squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of acceptable attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism. (Quote by - Charles W. Moore)
They were protesting police brutality, oppression and other social ills that were hurting the black community. ... I don't say that justifies it. But people understood what they really meant by it. (Quote by - Bill Hampton)
Never underestimate internalized racism. People can be oppressed, yet continue to express their oppression in their own choices. (Quote by - Susan Morris)
Half a world away nations that once lived under oppression and tyranny are now budding democracies due in large part to America 's leadership and the sacrifices of our military. (Quote by - Bob Riley)
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. (Quote by - Lord Acton)
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. (Quote by - Dorothy Allison)
Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents. (Quote by - James Madison)
Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. (Quote by - Georges Bernanos)
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. (Quote by - P. D. Ouspensky)
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. (Quote by - David Foster Wallace)
Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness. (Quote by - Justice Stephen J. Field)
The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another. (Quote by - Nelson Mandela)
Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction. (Quote by - Thomas Babington Macaulay)
First we kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, the undecided. (Quote by - General Iberico Saint Jean)
Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn't stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband -- it creeps up insidiously... step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realizes that it is gone. (Quote by - Baron Lane)
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. (Quote by - Viktor Frankl)
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! (Quote by - Patrick Henry)
In 1950, the average family of four paid 2% of its earnings to federal taxes. Today it pays 24%. (Quote by - William R. Mattox, Jr.)
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)
In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. (Quote by - Reverend Martin Niemoeller)
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate. (Quote by - Isaiah Berlin)
To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them. (Quote by - George Mason)
Competition is easier to accept if you realize it is not an act of oppression or abrasion - I've worked with my best friends in direct competition. (Quote by - Diane Sawyer)
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. (Quote by - Friedrich Nietzsche)
He who allows oppression shares the crime. (Quote by - Desiderius Erasmus)
Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth. (Quote by - Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi)
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. (Quote by - Thomas Paine)
Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine. (Quote by - Victor Ferkiss)
I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation. (Quote by - Theodore Bikel)
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility. (Quote by - Eric Hoffer)
Censorship is a dangerous tool that is primarily used to suppress from those who would challenge oppression by the society and that state, and particularly victimizes minorities. [It] can never eliminate evil ideas, and so the best answer to bad speech is more speech. (Quote by - Feminists Against Censorship)
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. (Quote by - Thomas Paine)
At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes. (Quote by - Jimmy Carter)
To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused. (Quote by - Lord George Lyttleton)
The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home. (Quote by - Carl T. Rowan)
The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ... This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave. (Quote by - Elmer Davis)
Birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings. (Quote by - Bayard Ruskin)
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. (Quote by - Ali A. Saleh)
The privilege of giving or withholding moneys is an important barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative which if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression; and all history shows how efficacious its intercession for redress of grievances and reestablishment of rights, and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics. (Quote by - Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.)
Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. (Quote by - Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi)
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. (Quote by - Virginia Woolf)
If the previous paragraphs [of 'A Religion For A New Age'] prove anything, it is that the Bible is not merely another book, an outmoded and archaic book, or even an extremely influential book; it has been and remains an incredibly dangerous book. It and the various Christian churches which are parasitic upon it have been directly responsible for most of the wars, persecutions and outrages which humankind has perpetrated upon itself over the past two thousand years. (Quote by - John J. Dunphy)
Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands. (Quote by - Justice Hugo L. Black)
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. (Quote by - Daniel Ortega)
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. (Quote by - Joseph Franklin Rutherford)
I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States. (Quote by - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny. (Quote by - Michael Parenti)
Still, corruption and oppression are far too common threats to the democratic society. (Quote by - Anna Lindh)
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. (Quote by - Samuel Adams)
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out. (Quote by - Reverend Martin Niemoeller)
The world is indebted for all triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good. (Quote by - Buddha)
I am fighting a fight against oppression where the poor and women are being violated, (Quote by - Mukhtar Mai)
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt. (Quote by - Walter Bagehot)
What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy. (Quote by - bell hooks)
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master. (Quote by - Demosthenes)
Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted. (Quote by - William Pinkney)
Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State. (Quote by - Benito Mussolini)
Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may. (Quote by - Sam Houston)
We're trying to apologize for years of white oppression. I know it doesn't make a nice sound bite, but ... (Quote by - Tim Bodine)
Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group. (Quote by - Robin Morgan)
A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen. (Quote by - Jean De La Bruyere)
To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large. (Quote by - Aristotle)
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. (Quote by - Anne Bradstreet)
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. (Quote by - Abraham Lincoln)
The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
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. (Quote by - John Charles Polanyi)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. (Quote by - Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
Refrain at all times from such Foods as cannot be procured without violence and oppression. (Quote by - Thomas Tryon)
Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression. (Quote by - Harry Belafonte)
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. (Quote by - Booker T. Washington)
We mourn the loss of Tom Fox, who combined a lightness of spirit, a firm opposition to all oppression, and the recognition of God in everyone. (Quote by - Carol Rose)
You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution. (Quote by - Huey P. Newton)
All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible. (Quote by - Noah Webster)
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. (Quote by - James Madison)
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. (Quote by - Frederick Douglass)
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining. (Quote by - Saul Bellow)
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. (Quote by - Friedrich Nietzsche)
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. (Quote by - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Man is not free unless government is limited.... As government expands, liberty contracts. (Quote by - Ronald Reagan)
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever. (Quote by - Thomas Paine)
The history of Christianity has been largely written in blood, the blood of those whom it has sought to proselytize as well as that of those Christians who did not share the theology or ambitions of the male clerical oligarchy that has always wielded power in Christendom. This ignoble distinction is not nor has it ever been the exclusive prerogative of any particular denomination or sect; it is a living legacy of horror that is tragically common to the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox bodies of Christian churches. (Quote by - John J. Dunphy)
Unlimited Power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it. (Quote by - William Pitt, Sr.)
It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available. (Quote by - Thomas Mann)
Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere. (Quote by - Harry Belafonte)
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks. (Quote by - John C. Calhoun)
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. (Quote by - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords. Lords without anger and honor, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labor and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. (Quote by - Gilbert K. Chesterton)
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. (Quote by - Vladimir Nabokov)
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. (Quote by - Thomas Paine)
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose, they might take my property or confiscate my earnings, what would my family do, how would they survive?' He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty! (Quote by - W. Vaughn Ellsworth)
The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. (Quote by - Henry Louis Mencken)
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at (Quote by - Henry Louis Mencken)
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. (Quote by - Louis D. Brandeis)
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it. (Quote by - Christopher Darlington Morley)
Small groups or communities may be far more oppressive to the individual than larger ones. Men are in many ways freer in large cities than in small villages. (Quote by - Morris R. Cohen)
A habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression. (Quote by - Joel Barlow)
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. (Quote by - Frank Herbert)
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. (Quote by - Albert Camus)
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. (Quote by - Plato)
Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself. (Quote by - Friedrich Nietzsche)
Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us. (Quote by - Butler D. Shaffer)
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. (Quote by - Albert Camus)
The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself. (Quote by - Joseph Sobran)
Why not include a provision that everybody shall, in good weather, hunt on his own land and catch fish in rivers that are public property and that Congress shall never restrain any inhabitant of America from eating and drinking, at seasonable times, or prevent his lying on his left side, in a long winter's night, or even on his back, when he is fatigued by lying on his right. (Quote by - Noah Webster)
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. (Quote by - Thabo Mbeki)
At Waco, was there really an urgency to get those people out of the compound at that particular time? Was the press going to make it look heroic for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms? At Ruby Ridge, there was one guy in a cabin at the top of the mountain. Was it necessary for federal agents to go up there and shoot a 14-year-old in the back and shoot a woman with a child in her arms? What kind of mentality does that? (Quote by - Clint Eastwood)
In a world without the law of God, you have chaos, oppression, tyranny, and everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. (Quote by - Randall Terry)
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. (Quote by - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin)
Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might. (Quote by - Aeschylus)
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. (Quote by - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves. (Quote by - Harriet Tubman)
Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power. (Quote by - Benito Mussolini)
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status. (Quote by - Laurence J. Peter)
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve. (Quote by - Ryszard Kapuscinski)
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction. (Quote by - Janet Frame)
If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take hashish. (Quote by - Friedrich Nietzsche)
Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until 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. (Quote by - Frederick Douglass)
But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. (Quote by - Declaration of Independence)
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left. (Quote by - Justice William O. Douglas)
Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws. (Quote by - Cornelius Tacitus)
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. (Quote by - Sir Winston Churchill)
There is nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitor. (Quote by - Frank Clark)
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. (Quote by - Stendhal)
No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. (Quote by - Joseph Addison)
If it doesn't happen, the continuing oppression will be met by more resistance from a less tolerant populace which wants a democratic restoration. And that resistance will only invite further oppression. (Quote by - Florencio Abad)
Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion. (Quote by - James Russell Lowell)
There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions… It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory. (Quote by - Sir Karl Popper)
Love of justice in the generality of men is only the fear of suffering from injustice. (Quote by - François Duc de La Rochefoucauld)
We seek to educate and nurture peace, equality, and dignity in a world hopeful and free of oppression. One of the evening's highlights is the discussion that follows each film. It offers an opportunity to speak about and listen respectfully to how others see important sensitive issues. (Quote by - Mary Nelson)
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. (Quote by - Sir Winston Churchill)
The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. (Quote by - Fredrich August von Hayek)
In the past I have defended the right of the IRA to engage in armed struggle. I did so because there was no alternative for those who would not bend the knee, or turn a blind eye to oppression, or for those who wanted a national republic. (Quote by - Gerry Adams)
Solidarity should also mean insistence on the rule of law. To close one's eyes to trampled freedoms, to get used to violence, become inured to political murders, is to approve them and accept that there are people deserving of justice and others deserving of oppression. (Quote by - Reporters Without Borders)
The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us ... (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows. (Quote by - Ludwig von Mises)
The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and…the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience. (Quote by - Justice William O. Douglas)
We don't hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression! (Quote by - Bobby Seale)
The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy. (Quote by - Adolf Hitler)
It's fun, I suppose. It may be that the story of Hanukkah has appeal, that's it's about not assimilating, about fighting oppression. But it's probably because they grew up with it. (Quote by - Ed Case)
Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government. (Quote by - Robert Briffault)
What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven. (Quote by - Friedrich Hoelderlin)
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. (Quote by - Benjamin Franklin)
We shall all respect the principles of each other and do nothing that would be regarded as an act of oppression to any portion of the people. (Quote by - Alexander Mackenzie)
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)
The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians. (Quote by - Angelica Grimke)
What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it. (Quote by - Margot Asquith)
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. (Quote by - Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress. (Quote by - Napoleon Bonaparte)
The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge. (Quote by - Butler D. Shaffer)
So long as people, being ill governed, suffer from hunger, criminals will never disappear. It is extremely unkind to punish those who, being suffers from hunger, are compelled to violate laws. (Quote by - Kenko Hoshi)
When a system of oppression has become institutionalized it is unnecessary for individuals to be oppressive. (Quote by - Florynce R. Kennedy)
It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves? (Quote by - Melians)
Gold is not neccesary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state, without an ounce of gold behind it. Anyone who sells above the set prices, let him be marched off to a concentration camp. That's the bastion of money. (Quote by - Adolf Hitler)
Oppression is more easily endured than insult. (Quote by - Junius)
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon. (Quote by - John Berger)
Pillow Girl. It's a statement on sexuality and femininity, the oppression of women. It lets you read so many things into it. (Quote by - Brian Owens)
We felt that the police needed a label, a label other than that fear image that they carried in the community. So we used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police. And it worked. (Quote by - Huey P. Newton)
We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression. (Quote by - Confucius)
But far be it from us to intend their hurt or damage, or to make war upon them, otherwise than to deliver ourselves and them from tyranny and oppression. (Quote by - Perkin Warbeck)
Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and made by the legislative power vested in it and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man. (Quote by - John Locke)
It is the duty of the officials to prevent or suppress the threatened disorder with a firm hand instead of timidly yielding to threats…. Surely a speaker ought not to be suppressed because his opponents propose to use violence. It is they who should suffer from their lawlessness, not he. (Quote by - American Bar Association)
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say? (Quote by - Vaclav Havel)
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilised nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future! (Quote by - Adolf Hitler)
When books are challenged, restricted, removed, or banned, an atmosphere of suppression exists…. The fear of the consequences of censorship is as damaging as, or perhaps more damaging than, the actual censorship attempt. After all, when a published work is banned, it can usually be found elsewhere. Unexpressed ideas, unpublished works, unpurchased books are lost forever. (Quote by - Robert P. Doyle)
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. (Quote by - Ambrose Bierce)
Police State: A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force. (Quote by - Yahooligans Reference)
All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. (Quote by - William Graham Sumner)
It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black. (Quote by - Harry Oppenheimer)
The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life. (Quote by - Justice William O. Douglas)
O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name! (Quote by - Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland)
Black people must address itself to the causes of poverty. That's oppression in this country. (Quote by - H. Rap Brown)
If Saddam Hussein committed crimes such as political oppression against the Iraqi people, it should be resolved legally in a fair and just manner which doesn't paint a sense of injustice, (Quote by - Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono)
I believe certain members of the U.S. Congress have aided in the oppression and diversion of critical information that could have revealed a fullness of truth long ago. (Quote by - Bo Gritz)
Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation. (Quote by - Simone de Beauvoir)
Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. (Quote by - Oscar Wilde)
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. (Quote by - Learned Hand)
In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out. (Quote by - Robert A. Heinlein)
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. (Quote by - Stewart L. Udall)
Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance. (Quote by - Everett Dean Martin)
No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed. (Quote by - Clarence Darrow)
To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas. (Quote by - Dr. G. Brock Chisolm)
It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery. (Quote by - Benjamin Disraeli)
The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world. (Quote by - Daniel Webster)
The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice. (Quote by - Justice Robert H. Jackson)
The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it. (Quote by - Andrew Jackson)
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison. (Quote by - William Glasser)
If Bush carries on with his lies and oppression, it would be useful for you to read the book Rogue State. (Quote by - Bin Laden)
As there is oppression of the majority such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred. (Quote by - Bram Fischer)
You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl. (Quote by - George Eliot)
Resistance to oppression is second nature. (Quote by - Seneca)
All oppression creates a state of war. (Quote by - Simone De Beauvoir)
These schools need to learn from history and end religion-based oppression. The Bible has been used for centuries to make an outcast. (Quote by - Haven Herrin)
Blues for me is having things not go your way - life, love, job, money, ... It is not about the oppression of my ancestors, who were trying to get back at the overseers. Blues is different for my generation. (Quote by - Robert Cray)
Political repression consists of government action which grossly discriminates against persons or organizations viewed as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or key governmental policies, because of their perceived political beliefs. (Quote by - Robert Justin Goldstein)
And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. (Quote by - John Steinbeck)
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever. (Quote by - George Orwell)
If any opinion be compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. (Quote by - John Stuart Mill)
Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous. (Quote by - Jay Fox)
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. (Quote by - Daniel Webster)
It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice. (Quote by - Herbert Hoover)
During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? more or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. (Quote by - James Madison)
We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others. (Quote by - François Duc de La Rochefoucauld)
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. (Quote by - Cornelius Tacitus)
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. (Quote by - Albert Einstein)
Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden. (Quote by - Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis)
The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority. (Quote by - Sir Thomas Browne)
The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty. (Quote by - Justice William O. Douglas)
People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict. (Quote by - Fannie Lou Hamer)
All oppressed people seize whatever weapons they can to fight oppression. (Quote by - John Lowe)
Everywhere you go on the continent of Europe at this hour you see the conflict between militarism and industrialism. You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations. (Quote by - William Graham Sumner)
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. (Quote by - Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches. (Quote by - Catherine of Siena)
The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world. (Quote by - Joseph H. Choate)
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. (Quote by - Fredrich August von Hayek)
Bigotry's birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings. (Quote by - Bayard Rustin)
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. (Quote by - Andrew Jackson)
If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it. (Quote by - Erich Fromm)
We continue to believe that what has happened to our teammates is the result of the actions of the U.S. and U.K. governments in their illegal attack on Iraq and the continuing occupation and oppression of its people. (Quote by - Rebecca Johnson)
We are in a country that has experienced 25 years of presidential oppression, ... What kind of a future can we look forward to if the president of the party, on losing a free and fair poll, nullifies it? (Quote by - Paul Themba Nyathi)
Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore. (Quote by - William Cowper)
An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. (Quote by - George Haven Putnam)
This award is a victory for poor women; it's a victory for all women, ... End oppression with education. (Quote by - Mukhtar Mai)
Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight. (Quote by - Rev. Henry Ward Beecher)
What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression. (Quote by - Roy Ayers)
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. (Quote by - Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
There can be no really pervasive system of oppression, such as that in the United States, without the consent of the oppressed (Quote by - Rose F. Kennedy)
An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger. (Quote by - Confucius)
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. (Quote by - Martin Luther King, Jr.)
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments. (Quote by - Georg C. Lichtenberg)
One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression. (Quote by - William Blake)
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). (Quote by - Ayn Rand)
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. (Quote by - Chen Ning Yang)
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. (Quote by - William Penn)
Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression. (Quote by - James K. Polk)
Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury. (Quote by - James Cone)
An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters. (Quote by - Henry Clay)
This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies." (Quote by - Jose Ortega y Gasset)
The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude. (Quote by - Andrea Dworkin)
Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead. (Quote by - Cherrie Moraga)
Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered. (Quote by - Marcus Tullius Cicero)
God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed. (Quote by - Luis Bunuel)
The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people. (Quote by - Bill Clinton)
He (Thomas Paine) saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar; venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the strong (Quote by - Robert Green Ingersoll)
The emerging picture is one where slavery, oppression and exploitation of society's most vulnerable members have by no means been consigned to the past. (Quote by - Juan Somavia)
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppressions, and there prevail justice and Faith in Allah; but if they cease, let there be no hostility except to those who practice oppression (Quote by - Quran)
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind. (Quote by - Henry Grady Weaver)
Oppression in the name of religion is a time-honored tradition. I'm sorry that people are fearful. Those fears are usually based on ignorance. (Quote by - Katy Sorenson)
A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house.... The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state. (Quote by - Richard E. Byrd)
Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others. (Quote by - Marcus Tullius Cicero)
Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves. (Quote by - D. H. Lawrence)
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans. (Quote by - Bill Clinton)
If I had a large amount of money I should found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily (Quote by - Stephen Fry)
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. (Quote by - Ambrose Bierce)
The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. (Quote by - Fredrich August von Hayek)
Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware. (Quote by - Arthur Koestler)
From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else. (Quote by - Chad Walsh)
A people armed and free forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression. (Quote by - James Madison)
It was a time of oppression and you spoke up -- and we won. Without you, I wouldn't be standing up here either. (Quote by - Terrence McNally)
The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles. (Quote by - Justice Benjamin Cardozo)
Those who regarded the revolution, during Imam Khomeini's time, as a deviation, are now [wielding] the tools of terror and oppression, (Quote by - Mohammad Khatami)
The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another. (Quote by - Edmund Burke)
We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure. (Quote by - Shirin Ebadi)
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise. (Quote by - E. M. Cioran)
In this workshop we hope to open discussion on the parallels between disability, oppression and racism. (Quote by - John Morman)
Silence increases the power of an oppressor. My job as a parent is to recognize oppression. I want my children to know whenever something is not right. (Quote by - Susan Geise)
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others. (Quote by - John F. Kennedy)
There will be no prison which can hold our movement down... The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people. (Quote by - Huey P. Newton)
When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia. (Quote by - George Mason)
Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. (Quote by - Carl Gustav Jung)
Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society. (Quote by - Francis Wright)
Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority. (Quote by - James A. C. Brown)
American strategic [nuclear] forces do not exist solely for the purpose of deterring a Soviet nuclear threat or attack against the U.S. itself. Instead, they are intended to support U.S. foreign policy. (Quote by - Colin Gray)
If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force. (Quote by - Hans Eysenck)
Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. (Quote by - Sir Winston Churchill)
If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)
Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government. (Quote by - Leon Trotsky)
Eight decades of amendments... to (the) code have produced a virtually impenetrable maze... The rules are unintelligible to most citizens... The rules are equally mysterious to many government employees who are charged with administering and enforcing the law. (Quote by - Shirley Peterson)
Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects. (Quote by - Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi)
But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. (Quote by - Isaiah Berlin)
America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within. (Quote by - Josef Stalin)
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior. (Quote by - Antonin Artaud)
Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter. (Quote by - Orson Scott Card)
Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. (Quote by - Jesus of Nazareth)
When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed. (Quote by - Civil Servants' Year Book)
O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more (Quote by - William Cowper)
Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men. (Quote by - Fredrich August von Hayek)
People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest. (Quote by - Thomas A. Edison)
All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems. (Quote by - Alva Myrdal)
If the innocent honest Man must quietly quit all he has for Peace sake, to him who will lay violent hands upon it, I desire it may be considered what kind of Peace there will be in the World, which consists only in Violence and Rapine; and which is to be maintained only for the benefit of Robbers and Oppressors. (Quote by - John Locke)
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. (Quote by - James Russell Lowell)
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life. (Quote by - Germaine Greer)
It sets a precedent, that Wal-Mart will not be permitted to violate the laws of California the way they did here, and the jury found that they had intentionally, with malice and oppression and fraud, violated the laws of the state of California. (Quote by - Fred Furth)
If none of us ever read a book that was dangerous, had a friend who was different, or joined an organization that advocated change, we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. (Quote by - Edward R. Murrow)
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. (Quote by - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization. (Quote by - Franklin D. Roosevelt)
Without Liberty, Law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without Law, Liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness. (Quote by - James Q. Wilson)
What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2nd it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3rd it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable. (Quote by - James Madison)
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. (Quote by - Arthur Henderson)
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear. (Quote by - Thomas Babington Macaulay)
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy. (Quote by - Abraham Lincoln)
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. (Quote by - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes (Quote by - Justice Felix Frankfurter)
Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others. (Quote by - Felix Adler)
The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward, political criminality was given a much broader definition than ever before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more laws or lawlike measures were put on the books than ever. (Quote by - Shelia Fitzpatrick)
Discipline must come through liberty... We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. (Quote by - Maria Montessori)
The more democratic space we have, the more focused we would be on our domestic problems. Arab governments used the struggle with Israel as an excuse for political oppression, as an excuse for their failure to run the country. (Quote by - Wahid Abdel Meguid)
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. (Quote by - Voltaire)
The occupation and robbery of a nation occurs under the illusion of freeing its citizens from brutal oppression. (Quote by - Ramman Kenoun)
The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur. (Quote by - James Bovard)
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. (Quote by - Bertrand de Jouvenel)
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. (Quote by - Eric Hoffer)
An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation. (Quote by - Justice John Marshall)
Oppression is allowed to survive because people don't like to talk about it or about acts like what happened. We're hoping to counter some of that with the help of this banner. (Quote by - Tim Gordon)
The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims. (Quote by - Arthur Miller)
Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. (Quote by - Jane Rule)
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression. (Quote by - Malcolm X)
It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine's correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines. (Quote by - Ludwig Von Mises)
The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd. (Quote by - Walter Lippmann)
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it. (Quote by - Herbert Marcuse)
There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful. (Quote by - Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama)
Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. (Quote by - Neil A. McDonald)
For black folks, the Confederate flag represents the same thing that the Nazi flag represents to the Jews. There is absolutely no difference when we look at it. Now, white folks try to explain it away like, 'Oh, it's OK.' But when you're black, it is not OK. It represents oppression and murder. (Quote by - Ken Page)
Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. (Quote by - Noah Webster)
Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom. (Quote by - Jose Marti y Perez)
Usually, when people talk about the strength of black women . . . . they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation. (Quote by - Bell Hooks)
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American. (Quote by - Rich Lowry)
According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them. (Quote by - Kort E. Patterson)
The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors. (Quote by - Meridel Le Sueur)
It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part. (Quote by - Benjamin Franklin)
Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans. (Quote by - William Blake)
He was firmly opposed to oppression and he recognized God in everyone. (Quote by - Brian Young)
A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man. (Quote by - Publius Cornelius Tacitus)
A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. (Quote by - John Stuart Mill)
But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression. (Quote by - John Locke)
I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. (Quote by - Frederick Douglass)
And slay them (the infidels) wherever you catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out, for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter (Quote by - Quran)
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. (Quote by - Justice Robert H. Jackson)
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. (Quote by - Justice William O. Douglas)
The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. (Quote by - George Orwell)
No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others. (Quote by - Tammy Bruce)
The use of religion as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time. (Quote by - Margaret Atwood)
We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been. (Quote by - Solon)
We must realize that companies such as Caterpillar are profiting from oppression. (Quote by - Chris Towne)
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. (Quote by - James Baldwin)
If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded. (Quote by - King Solomon)
There is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions... The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy. (Quote by - John Stuart Mill)
Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over. (Quote by - Frank Zappa)
The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own. (Quote by - Sir Richard Burton)
Standing up to a tyrant has always been illegal and dangerous. There is no guarantee but one -- to not live like a slave, nor to die like one. (Quote by - Eric Schaub)
The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole. (Quote by - Arnold J. Toynbee)
People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. (Quote by - Emily Dickinson)
I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate. (Quote by - Eric Hoffer)
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. (Quote by - John Morley)
We will definitely provide financial aid to this government so they can stand up against the oppression of America. (Quote by - Ali Larijani)
We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice. (Quote by - Woody Allen)
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. (Quote by - John Stuart Mill)
No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions. (Quote by - Murray B. Levin)
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. (Quote by - Henry Steele Commager)
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment. (Quote by - Alan Watts)
Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it. (Quote by - Anna Sewell)
