Audre Lorde Quotes

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious.

I don't want to be a dissident. But in the same time, I don't want to go back home and be silent again.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness.

There are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everybody go along to get along, but that's not going to be very helpful for us in the long run, in terms of solving our problems. And somebody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to, you know, the bullies.

The people in Cuba, they know what I stand for, and there's a lot of people in Cuba that stand for the same. But they can't say it.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

When men hold their peace, the stones will cry out.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

… obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.

They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become.

For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They've made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call "intellectuals," but typically not by all; there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way; how depends on the nature of the society.