Quotes about Oppression

Years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Trade Unionist.

What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia.

A state which which includes within itself a terrorized Church has lost its most faithful servant.

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

The question that wins the world is not, how can we get our "morally superior" way enforced in the world? The question that wins the world, and the question that must define the individual and collective life of kingdom-of-God citizens is, how do we take up the cross for the world? How do we best communicate to others their unsurpassable worth before God? How do we serve and wash the feet of the oppressed and despised?

scapegoaters, but rather on the side of the scapegoated victim.

People in oppressive political situations are so afraid to give voice to their convictions that they lose confidence in the very category of truth and in the power of speech to bring clarity and liberation.

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

I'm sick and tired of black and white people of good intent giving aspirin to a society that is dying of a cancerous disease.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.