Quotes about Oppression

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ears of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up.... The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber.... To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

The Negro's great stumbling block is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice,… who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

It was argued that the Negro was inferior by nature because of Noah's curse upon the children of Ham.... The greatest blasphemy of the whole ugly process was that the white man ended up making God his partner in the exploitation of the Negro.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.

Deliverance is not the same as freedom. Deliverance is release from the oppressor, but freedom is deliverance from oppression.

There is truly no greater burden than freedom, no heavier load than liberty.

The heirs of that liberal theology are today keen to marginalize the Bible, declaring that it supports slavery and other wicked things, because they don't like what it says on other topics such as sexual ethics. But if you push the Bible off the table, you are merely colluding with pagan empire, denying yourself the sourcebook for your kingdom critique of oppression. The Sadducee didn't know the Bible or God's power; that's why they denied the resurrection and supported Rome.