#injustice

It's an insidious idea, this notion that there is life after death. The promise of a reward in the afterlife has been used as an excuse to deny help to the poor, helpless and oppressed; to explain away human misery rather than deal with it. It is an idea that is used to encourage young men and women to kill themselves, and others, so that they can become martyrs. It allows victims of injustice to be told not to worry because justice will be done in the afterlife. It depresses me to think that so many people on the planet live their lives with this notion. Can we truly fulfill our potential as a species as long as we hold on to, and encourage, the perpetuation of the lie of life after death? ↗

— Alom Shaha

#atheism #injustice #justice #life-after-death #martyrs

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#microfinance #poverty #social-business #society #business

Yet it is true—skin can mean a great deal. Mine means that any man may strike me in a public place and never fear the consequences. It means that my friends do not always like to be seen with me in the street. It means that no matter how many books I read, or languages I master, I will never be anything but a curiosity—like a talking pig or a mathematical horse. ↗

— Susanna Clarke

#racism #mathematics

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory. ↗

— Miguel de Unamuno

#injustice

Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name. ↗

— Joseph O'Connor

#freedom #injustice #love #freedom

Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957) ↗

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

#expectations #fairness #injustice #perception #society

Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black. ↗

— Michelle Alexander

#injustice #jim-crow #racism #age

There is not a single injustice in Northern Ireland that is worth the loss of a single British soldier or a single Irish citizen either. ↗

— James Callaghan

#citizen #either #injustice #ireland #irish

We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. ↗

— Davy Crockett

#balance #dead #injustice #into #lead

And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#freedom