#oppress

When we take your person into account, you who are a young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion who casts the rebels down and feeds France with the sweet, nourishing milk of peace, here indeed is something quite extraordinary! For if God performed such a great number of miracles through Joshua who conquered many a place and cast down many an enemy, he, Joshua, was a strong and powerful man. But, after all, a woman – a simple shepherdess – braver than any man ever was in Rome! As far as God is concerned, this was easily accomplished. But as for us, we never heard tell of such an extraordinary marvel, for the prowess of all the great men of the past cannot be compared to this woman's whose concern it is to cast out our enemies. This is God's doing: it is He who guides her and who has given her a heart greater than that of any man. ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#empowerment #feminism #freedom #gender #joan-of-arc

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#capitalism #corruption #government #history #oppression

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. ↗

— James A. Baldwin

#begin #does #effectively #enough #know

BLOODY LIPS The bloody wound Of the gladiator Gurgles out life's end. The cries of acclimations from the stands Fill the sky with raging tigers. Waving their arms about to incite the masses The aging notables add an air of dignity to the arena. Making their separate entries they K N E E L over the still-warm corpses Of the young. Their withered lips they pose Upon the fresh flowing wounds And, to prolong their lives – so they believe, Suck, ravenously suck out the blood, blood, blood. Fresh blood from the sun Flowing into filthy veins As into sewage pipes, And thus the Heart of the Nation is abandoned. ↗

— Visar Zhiti

#bloodsport #gladiators #oppression #tyranny #vampire

As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism. ↗

— Angela Davis

#against #american #black #bound #fight

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision... is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive. ↗

— Barbara Deming

#choice #concept #enable #familiar #hold

The severest trial of oppression is the constant outrage which one suffers at the thought of the oppressor. What Jesus discovered was how to avoid the inner devastations. His technique was to practice the opposite emotion... [a man] may not get his freedom or possessions back, but he's less miserable. It's a difficult lesson. ↗

— B.F. Skinner

#oppression #freedom

By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression. ↗

— Manning Marable

#beyond #black #categories #construct #dismantling

Together we have travelled a long road to be where we are today. This has been a road of struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression. ↗

— Thabo Mbeki

#apartheid #been #colonial #long #long road

Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims. ↗

— Amos Oz

#arab #between #case #children #conflict