F. Sionil Jose Quotes

I don't hate nobody. I hate certain conditions that are inflicted upon the people - and they're helpless with it.

Unless you've been touched personally, it's difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever.

There are people who are victims in life, and I don't think they should be encouraged.

Wealth is being generated off the back of oppression and abuse.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

And the whole thing is that you're treated like a step-child. Here it was down here, everything in the black, because they were stealing, basically. Stealing from us old country boys down here.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

The weak are more likely to make the strong weak than the strong are likely to make the weak strong.

Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.

I do think that this planet is a totally unjust planet. I mean throughout history - history paints a beautiful picture when it's written by the victorious, but it's a planet that belongs to the strong and the more able, and usually they are tyrants. So basically, I don't see justice happening to the crushed and the weak.

Some feel as though the world is their oyster; others feel as though they were the oyster itself, plucked from the ocean, cracked open, and robbed of all that is precious to them.

Too often, systems of oppression turn those who are the targets of the oppression against one another.

They don’t hate the West because of any specific policy or action like Israel or Iraq. They just hate because they have been unsuccessful; they feel that they’ve been denied their rightful place in life.

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

It would be hard to avoid the conclusion that we are a society composed entirely of battered wives, molested children, humiliated ethnic groups, exploited workers, and other groups despised for their sexual preferences or cultural attributes, all spoiling in a festering environment.

A people that patiently lets itself be trampled, deserves to be trampled and crushed.

The weak are always at war with the stronger; that is the source of eternal hatreds.

People have nothing to lose. Government has stripped them of their dignity and their respect.

Woe to them, that take away the right of the poor.