Famous Oppression Quotes

birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.
-- Bayard Ruskin

A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.
-- Tacitus

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
-- Saul Bellow

First we kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, the undecided.
-- General Iberico Saint Jean

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.
-- Thomas Paine

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.
-- Simone Weil

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.
-- William Penn

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.
-- Clarence Darrow

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.
-- Anna Sewell

The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.
-- Meridel Le Sueur

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper and render them more important.
-- Hosea Ballou

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
-- Booker T Washington