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1 " Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims. "
― Salman Rushdie
2 " [H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign? "
― Nick Hornby , Fever Pitch
3 " A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value. "
― Allan G. Johnson , The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy
4 " I am in love with this world... I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvest, I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have sown. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings. "
― John Burroughs , The Summit of the Years (The Writings of John Burroughs Part Seventeen)
5 " Another basic characteristic of liberalism which constitutes a formidable obstacle to an oppressed group's liberation is its conception of human nature. If selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate, really are among defining human traits, as every liberal philosopher since Locke tries to convince us, the oppression in civil society—i.e. in the social sphere not regulated by the state—is a fact of life, and the basic civil relationship between a man and a women will always remain a battlefield. Woman, being less aggressive, is then either the less human of the two and doomed to subjugation, or else she must get more power-hungry herself and try to dominate man. Liberation for both is not feasible. "
6 " [Stieg] was describing Sweden the way it was and the way he saw the country: the scandals, the oppression of women, the friends he cherished and wished to honor. "
― Eva Gabrielsson
7 " Centuries of social conditioning has created a generational fear among women of being perceived as masculine.This is where all the shaming and labels come into play, which perpetuate the oppression of girls and women. As a society we shame girls with deep voices or masculine features and we shame boys with soft voices or effeminate gestures. Girls get called " too manly" and boys get called " too girly" . The only solution I can think of is to be unashamedly " you" . If that means challenging stereotypes and gender norms, go right ahead! "
8 " Teaching and learning _religious plurality often ends up privileging religious _texts_ over _practice_ and largely ignoring the social and historical contexts and the lived experience of people who shape, situate, and structure these religious texts. Furthermore, adopting the politics of recognition as a pedagogical principle in teaching can lead to an _uncritical silence_ about the various forms of oppression and domination of certain religious groups. Here people often use _religious difference_ as a _religious alibi_ for the oppression or violation of human rights of certain groups of people, such as women or LGBT people. "
― Namsoon Kang , Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World
9 " Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman's hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes. "
― CrimethInc. , Contradictionary
10 " If the social stress is physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the way to treat the depression is to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, advocates of the biochemical treatment of depression have gone along with the view of academic theory and popular culture that the problem is entirely within the skull of the victim. Enthusiasm for biochemical treatment and research is partly due to the fact that it helps perpetuate the myth that suicide and depression should be treated by changing the victim, not by changing ourselves. As long as we have a narrow view of the causes of biochemical imbalance, such as limiting it to innate genetic defects, we can practice denial on the social complicity in the causation of suicide. The narrow view does nothing to help reduce pain and increase resources for the millions of people whose problems do not respond to medications. It also deprives us of an opportunity for progress in a much broader area for social reform. The dynamics behind the oppression of the suicidal is similar to the dynamics of other forms of injustice; progress in one area can support progress in other areas. "
― , Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
11 " In terms of the real quality of a human being, only when suffering comes, when pain comes, does a man stand up as a human being. You can see great human beings surface only when the society is really suffering. When India was under the oppression of British rulers, how many wonderful people stood up? Where are they now? They have just fallen back into their comforts, that's all. All those Ghandis, Patels, Tilaks are still there, but they're dormant. When pain came, they all became alive. They left everything behind and stood up as giants. Where are they now? This is the human misfortune that still there's not enough intelligence in the world that human beings will rise to their peaks when everything is well. They wait for calamities. "
― Sadhguru , Mystic's Musings
12 " Irony: Taking a 170-year-old envy-based " philosophy," which has led to the murder of several hundred million human beings and the oppression of billions more, and calling it " progressive" . "
13 " Often we blame a region's religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it's also true that . . . it is often cited by the oppressors. "
― Nicholas D. Kristof , Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
14 " Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against. "
― DaShanne Stokes
15 " Take terrorism, one example among the methods used in that struggle. We know that leftist tradition condemns terrorism and political assassination. When the colonized uses them, the leftist colonizer becomes unbearably embarrassed. He makes an effort to separate them from the colonized's voluntary action; to make an epiphenomenon out of his struggle. They are spontaneous outbursts of masses too long oppressed, or better yet, acts by unstable, untrustworthy elements which the leader of the movement has difficulty in controlling. Even in Europe, very few people admitted that the oppression of the colonized was so great, the disproportion of forces so overwhelming, that they had reached the point, whether morally correct or not, of using violent means voluntarily. The leftist colonizer tried in vain to explain actions which seemed incomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the death of children and persons outside of the struggle, or even of colonized persons who, without being basically opposed, disapproved of some small aspect of the undertaking. At first he was so disconcerted that the best he could do was to deny such actions; for they would fit nowhere in his view of the problem. That it could be the cruelty of oppression which explained the blind fury of the reaction hardly seemed to be an argument to him; he can't approve acts of the colonized which he condemns in the colonizers because these are exactly why he condemns colonization.Then, after having suspected the information to be false, he says, as a last resort, that such deeds are errors, that is, they should not belong to the essence of the movement. He bravely asserts that the leaders certainly disapprove of them. A newspaper-man who always supported the cause of the colonized, weary of waiting for censure which was not forthcoming, finally called on certain leaders to take a public stand against the outrages, Of course, received no reply; he did not have the additional naïveté to insist. "
― Albert Memmi , The Colonizer and the Colonized
16 " Precious is sleep, better to be of stone,while the oppression and the shame still last;not seeing and not hearing, I am blest;so do not wake me, hush! keep your voice down. "
― Michelangelo Buonarroti , Complete Poems and Selected Letters
17 " For theologians groaning under the oppression of demands to justify their discipline before the bar of what is supposed to be universally valid scientific method the appeal of non-foundationalism is immense. It liberates a celebration of the rights of particularity. It enables the theologian to say that theological method must be different from other methods because it shapes its approach from the distinctive content with which it has to do - just as, indeed, other disciplines shape their approaches in the light of their distinctive content. Non-foundationalism, that is to say, is a way of advocating the autonomy of distinct intellectual disciplines. "
― Colin E. Gunton , The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity
18 " Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself. "
― Leon Trotsky , Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky
19 " We preach revolution but whine about the oppression in the name of change "
20 " We preach revolution but whine about the oppression in the name of change. "