#oppress

Individuals are prey to institutions in modern mass societies... Individuals can struggle mightily against institutionalized conditions, but without changing the institutions themselves, those efforts will be largely for naught, since people tire, lose focus, forget, and, eventually, give up their ghosts, while institutions share no such limitations. ↗

— Brian Awehali

#politics #politics-observation #power #radicalism #change

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 or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. ↗

— Aung San Suu Kyi

#dictatorship #dignity #fear #freedom #human-rights

May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin! ↗

— Joseph Warren

#american-revolution #freedom #oppression #freedom

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 would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#crime #degrade #fear #hatred #oppression

L'ideologie chrétienne n'a pas peu contribué à l'oppression de la femme. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#female-oppression #gender-inequality #religion #religion

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

— Joseph Addison

#heavy #inflicted #lasting #legal #oppression

The establishment of Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world. ↗

— Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

#establishment #islamic #islamic world #move #oppressor

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people. ↗

— John Desmond Bernal

#condition #creature #expression #heartless #once

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#class #conspiracy #degrade #denied #enforced

He who allows oppression shares the crime. ↗

— Desiderius Erasmus

#crime #oppression #shares #who