#oppression

There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page Of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of toll; How frugal is the chariot That bears a human soul! ↗

— Emily Dickinson

#poetry #oppression

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars--a cage, so peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#oppression

...oppression is as American as apple pie... ↗

— Audre Lorde

#oppression

Nos instruyen y preparan en la juventud para una profesión, para cumplir los deberes ciudadanos, para el servicio militar, nos enseñaban las reglas del aseo, a comportarnos bien y hasta a comprender lo bello (esto último no tanto). Pero la instrucción, la educación, la experiencia, no nos preparan en absoluto para la gran prueba de nuestra vida: para el arresto por nada y para el sumario sobre nada. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#totalitarianism #totalitarianism

If tyranny and oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. ↗

— James Madison

#patriot-act #tyranny #war #acting

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed. ↗

— Wally Lamb

#oppression #defeat

I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation. ↗

— Theodore Bikel

#gives #hate #hope #i #liberation

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. ↗

— Audre Lorde

#minority #oppression #race-relations #responsibility #sexual-orientation

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. ↗

— Louis D. Brandeis

#alone #assembly #bondage #burnt #cannot

At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes. ↗

— Jimmy Carter

#center #give #heroes #human #human rights