Quotes about Oppression

But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself, for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.

Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

Thus fearful alike, of those within the prison and of those without; of noise and silence; light and darkness; of being released, and being left there to die; he was so tortured and tormented, that nothing man has ever done to man in the horrible caprice of power and cruelty, exceeds his self-inflicted punishment.

The devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot's dread of a newspaper that laughs.

Christian theology is for the liberation of all humanity, and it could never be neutral in the fight against oppression. That much I knew. And that was how A Black Theology of Liberation was born: with the spirit of Martin and Malcolm, Jimmy, and the black poets of the 1960s.

The oppressed…have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force."

Only the oppressed can receive liberating visions in wretched places. Only those thinking emerges in the context of the struggle against injustice can see God's freedom breaking into unfree conditions and thus granting power to the powerless to fight here and now for the freedom they know to be theirs in Jesus' cross and resurrection

They shouted, danced, clapped their hands and stomped their feet as they bore witness to the power of Jesus' cross which had given them an identity far more meaningful than the harm that white supremacy could do them.

For most evangelicals, revelation was found in the inerrant scriptures, and one need not look elsewhere. I knew in my gut that God's revelation was found among poor black people.

How to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression.

Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America's cross.

Freedom means taking sides in a crisis situation, when a society is divided into oppressed and oppressors. In this situation we are not permitted the luxury of being on neither side by making a decision that only involves the self.