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#1

“For Ragamuffins, God's name is Mercy. We see our darkness as a prized possession because it drives us into the heart of God. Without mercy our darkness would plunge us into despair - for some, self-destruction. Time alone with God reveals the unfathomable depths of the poverty of the spirit. We are so poor that even our poverty is not our own: It belongs to the mysterium tremendum of a loving God.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

tags: god, mercy, poverty, prayer, ragamuffin, spirit

62 likes

#2

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

tags: aristocracy, capitalism, corruption, government, history, oppression, power, rationalization, society

1785 likes

#3

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

792 likes

#4

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

tags: liberation, oppression, resistance

480 likes

#5

“It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”
― Horace Greeley

tags: bible, freedom, god, law, liberty, oppression, slavery, truth

106 likes

#6

“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, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

tags: humanity, minority, oppression, race-relations, responsibility, sexual-orientation

390 likes

#7

“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, Freedom from Fear

tags: civilization, dictatorship, dignity, fear, freedom, human-rights, oppression, self-respect

281 likes

#8

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.”
― Eugene Victor Debs

tags: authoritarianism, deception, exploitation, fundamentalism, nationalism, oppression, patriotism, religion, totalitarianism, tyranny

502 likes

#9

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
― William O. Douglas (ed.), The Douglas letters: Selections from the private papers of Justice William O. Douglas

tags: awareness, darkness, liberty, nightfall, oppression, twilight, watchfulness

89 likes

#10

“The ignorance of the oppressed is strength for the oppressor.”
― A.R. Bernard

tags: ignorance, oppression

56 likes

#11

“Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.”
― Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth

tags: corruption, oppression, power, reformers, social-justice

37 likes

#12

“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

tags: america, american-revolution, freedom, oppression

16 likes

#13

“...it is not really the difference the oppressor fears so much as the similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shit on... . He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different.”
― Cherrie Morago, Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los Estados Unidos

tags: feminism, oppression

19 likes

#14

“The core of liberation theology is profoundly "theologal" - that is, rooted in the very nature of God. You see, there's an immediate relationship between God, oppression, liberation: God is in the poor who cry out. And God is the one who listens to the cry and liberates, so that the poor no longer need to cry out. ( Leonardo Boff, p. 166)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

tags: god, liberation-theology, oppression

10 likes

#15

“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, Jolie Blon's Bounce

tags: blackjack, crime, degrade, fear, hatred, oppression, plantations, racism, rape, satan, southern

7 likes

#16

“Power is given only to those you allow to have power over you. No man was born with a master. The only master of all is the Creator, and he created all men to be free. Freedom is a God-given right, not a human-granted gift. No man should have to fight to breathe in good health and peace.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

tags: breathe, collective-power, creator, fight, fighting, free, freedom, freewill, ggod, gift, god, health, human, human-rights, humane, humanity, justice, man, master, oppression, peace, politics, poverty, right, rights, slave, slavery, struggle, suffering, truth, will, willpower, world-peace

4 likes

#17

“I asked them why when they persecute men, for religion or colour it was seen by the world as oppression and when they persecute women, it was dismissed as tradition.”
― Emer Martin, Baby Zero

30 likes

#19

“All religions, in their pure form, will tell you God is Love. And power, fear, division, judgment, oppression, hatred and self-righteousness are the opposite of Love. So going to war, for example, in the name of religion, is a complete contradiction. No pure religious leader would ever support this.”
― The Truth AD Infinitum

tags: ad, ad-infinitum, contradiction, division, fear, hatred, infinitum, inspiration, inspirational-living, inspirational-love, inspirational-quotes, inspirational-religious, judgement, judgment, love, love-and-peace, love-and-power, oppression, religion, religion-and-philosophy, religion-and-war, religious-contradiction, religious-controversy, religious-faith, religious-hypocrisy, religious-leaders, religious-leadership, religious-quotes, religious-tolerance, self-righteousness, the-truth, the-truth-ad-infinitum, the-truth-inspiration, the-truth-is, the-truth-will-set-you-free

6 likes

#20

“No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to being to question: Why?”
― Paulo Freire

tags: oppressed, oppression, question, revolutionary

8 likes

#21

“The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish thinker and teacher appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. 'In him was life; and the life was the light of men.' Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.”
― Howard Thurman

tags: fear, hatred, hypocrisy, jesus, oppression, survival

33 likes

#22

“As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other...Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.”
― Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

tags: black, compatibility, feminism, movement, opposition, oppression, racism, sexism, woman

6 likes

#24

“It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

tags: anger, hatred, oppression

135 likes

#25

“If you are blaming the oppressed rather than the oppressor you know that something is wrong.”
― Adam Snowflake

tags: oppression

5 likes

#26

“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

tags: equal, oppression, sameness

7 likes

#27

“No one is more vulnerable to fear than a man who keeps another in bondage. He will do anything to prevent justice from rearing its head — for he knows well what he deserves at the hands of those he subjugates.”
― Jane Jensen, Sins of the Fathers

tags: fear, justice, oppression, retribution, slavery

10 likes

#28

“Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.”
― Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956

tags: injustice, oppression, radicalism, rebellion

18 likes

#29

“Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

tags: adam-gottbetter, dehumanisation, dehumanization, education-system, educational, educational-system, oppression

66 likes

#30

“Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.”
― Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture

tags: church-and-state, oppression, politics

4 likes

#31

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

tags: hope, injustice, politcal

246 likes

#32

“Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

tags: anarchism, anarchy, oppression

37 likes

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