“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don't see it, but because they see it and they don't want it to exist.”— bell hooks
“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”— James Baldwin
“Maybe it was a land of sunshine and oranges. But it was also a land of oppression and shadow.”— Peter Abrahams
“Military dictatorship is a cursed tree. It has roots in the heart of the people, and its branches are spread all over the country.”— Benazir Bhutto
“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them.”— Emily Brontë
“The things I really want to say are things that I have been beaten into silence for.”— Nikki Giovanni
“As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.”— Marian Anderson
“The intellectual's temptation is to be not on the side of the oppressed, but against the oppressor.”— Raymond Aron
“The State is a vast slaughterhouse, and a graveyard, where all the living aspirations and forces of a country come to be slain and buried.”— Mikhail Bakunin
“The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.”— Steve Biko
“The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”— Frantz Fanon
“In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad.”— Anna Akhmatova
“The establishment has an interest in pretending that the oppressed are not men.”— Alexander Comfort
“I think that we've gotten to a place where we think that being offended is the same as being oppressed.”— D. L. Hughley