#oppression

The "norm" for humanity is love. Brutality is an aberration. We are not sinners by nature. We learn to be bad. We are taught to stray from our good paths. We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy. ↗

— Jack D. Forbes

#civilization #critique #humanity #inspirational #love

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression. ↗

— John Charles Polanyi

#been #brutal #century #human #human rights

Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may. ↗

— Sam Houston

#come #learn #may #oppression #source

Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#limits #oppression #sadomasochism #sex #sexuality

Wir sind das Volk!" Dieser Satz hat uns gelehrt, dass wir, wenn wir unserer Sehnsucht glauben und ihr vertrauen, die Angst verlieren können. Eine Angst, die willfährige Dienerin jeder Art von nicht legitimierter Herrschaft ist, die uns ohnmächtig macht, die uns bindet. In dem Augenblick aber, in dem wir unsere Angst als Angst benennen und Anpassung und Angst als Geschwisterkinder erkennen, sind wir möglicherweise bereit zu erproben: Können wir auch ohne sie leben? In genau diesem Augenblick wachsen uns jene Kräfte zu, die eine ganze Gesellschaft verändern können. ↗

— Joachim Gauck

#civil-rights #courage #democracy #dictatorship #empowerment

Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere. ↗

— Harry Belafonte

#always #american #american policy #everywhere #foreign

...and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us; do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?> If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#equality #jewish-oppression #jews #racism #religion

I walk the city, through its crush of people and its smells: body odour, rotting food, vomit and urine. A cocktail of oppression and freedom. ↗

— Emma Cameron

#freedom #oppression #people #smells #walk

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#blacks #conscious #hideous #like #oppression

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it... In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#civil-disobedience #dangers-of-obedience #justice #oppression #rule-of-law