#injustice

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

— Joseph O'Connor

#freedom #injustice #love #freedom

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

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

The international community is pushing things forward in Bosnia... but it is doing it at expense of the Muslim people. I feel it as an injustice, these are the things that I cannot live with. ↗

— Alija Izetbegovic

#cannot #community #doing #expense #feel

Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit. ↗

— Alveda King

#because #become #binds #cannot #commit

Our arguments - and those of hundreds more Venezuelans suffering the same injustice - are clear and forceful: political disqualification violates laws in Venezuela and throughout the continent. ↗

— Leopoldo Lopez

#continent #forceful #hundreds #injustice #laws

It would be easy to become a victim of our circumstances and continue feeling sad, scared or angry; or instead, we could choose to deal with injustice humanely and break the chains of negative thoughts and energies, and not let ourselves sink into it. ↗

— Erin Gruwell

#injustice #negative-attitude #negative-thoughts #negativity #overcome

There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#coruage #indignation #injustice #inspiration #popular-movements

It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#citizenship #courage #democracy #free-speech #freedom

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#authoritarianism #bill-of-rights #constitution #democracy #egalitarianism