#oppression

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. ↗

— Audre Lorde

#minority #oppression #race-relations #responsibility #sexual-orientation

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. ↗

— Louis D. Brandeis

#alone #assembly #bondage #burnt #cannot

I don't think the Egyptian people want to see what is a very clear effort to obtain political and economic rights turn into any kind of new form of oppression or suppression or violence or letting loose criminal elements. ↗

— Hillary Clinton

#clear #criminal #economic #effort #egyptian

How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens? ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#husbands #lovelessness #marriage #married-life #matrimony

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression. ↗

— Confucius

#feel #oppression #should #sink #sorrow

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. ↗

— Rita Dove

#adversity #almost #begin #being #convey

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained. ↗

— Derrick A. Bell

#equality #ethics #injustice #meritocracy #prosperity

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. ↗

— James Q. Wilson

#becomes #law #liberty #licentiousness #loses

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. ↗

— Chen Ning Yang

#anger #been #china #corruption #decadent

Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#exploitation #oppression #orgonem-emotional-plague #attitude