When we’re afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators’ repression.

A good man would never harm or oppress another. A good man will share his last morsel of food with others in need, and die of hunger when he no longer has any food –...

We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will...

It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand...

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

If you are blaming the oppressed rather than the oppressor you know that something is wrong.

When I was a child, to call someone ‘black’ was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close...

[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.

Wir sind das Volk!”Dieser Satz hat uns gelehrt, dass wir, wenn wir unserer Sehnsucht glauben und ihr vertrauen, die Angst verlieren können. Eine Angst, die willfährige Dienerin jeder Art von nicht legitimierter Herrschaft ist, die...

…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Some PeopleSome people flee some other people. In some country under a sun and some clouds. They abandon something close to all they’ve got, sown fields, some chickens, dogs, mirrors in which fire now preens....

It’s no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work

Take terrorism, one example among the methods used in that struggle. We know that leftist tradition condemns terrorism and political assassination. When the colonized uses them, the leftist colonizer becomes unbearably embarrassed. He makes an...

Christmas has become a public affirmation of the power and benignity of the state, to which we all make obeisance in the sybolism of the breath test ceremony.

The thing about oppression is this: when you hold someone down, you, too, have to be there to make sure they don’t move.

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to...

But no one could say he hadn’t gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children...

Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days.

Religion, which was obviously created to give meaning and purpose to people, has become part of the oppression. This is true in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were all...

Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I’ll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let’s call it,...

We’re a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

Ignorance is the supreme oppressor.

We walked through the streets with our protectors. We wore our dresses. We gave up our education because that was the price of safety. That was the bargain we made with the devil we knew...

Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.

I walk the city, through its crush of people and its smells:body odour, rotting food, vomit and urine. A cocktail of oppression and freedom.

And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we’ve...

An individual excels where the institution fails.

Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments...

How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a...

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...

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property...

The ignorance of the oppressed is strength for the oppressor.

The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or...

Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by...

Beauty can make a woman rich, but if she relies solely on her looks to get by, she’ll always remain under a man’s thumb.

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

It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women’s sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born...

One is that if women’s sexuality in Africa wasn’t under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren’t subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have...