Vera Lynn Quotes

A fair observer only has to ask: If there is violence, who profits?

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

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

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

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.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Whenever there are enclosing walls, there are abuses behind them.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slaver's scars, I am the Red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same ole stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor.

Brother! We have, as your friends, fought by your side, and have poured out our blood in your defense, but our arms are now broken. You have grown large. My people have become small, and there are none who take pity on them.

At what point do the oppressed become the oppressors?

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.

The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved

With what moral authority can they [the U. S.] speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated?

As long as inequality and other social problems plague us, populists will try to exploit them.

I do not like the way oppressed Filipinos are being treated now. They are oppressed and have no one to turn to.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

Some of the metaphors you find in 'Wicked' - how those in power can exploit fear in others to maintain their power - I think, as Jews, we've seen that historically on more than one occasion.

While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.