Edwin Markham Quotes

Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' Wouldn't they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism.

Despotism is the only form of government which may with safety to itself, neglect the education of its infant poor.

There will always be those people who are just backward and ignorant. There will always be those people. They need somebody to feel superior to.

The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.

I grew up in society when lots of things were hidden, and they were not hidden just one way, but it was very complicated.

It's always the minorities who aren't a part of the mainstream who define what the limits... of the majority are going to be.

The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.

I learned to think about religion, race and sex through the complex and often unattractive medium of jokes.

We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right.

Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.

If you've ever felt oppressed on any level, there's something from 'The Wire' that you can take and identify with.

Statistically, a “normal” human being in today’s world is poor, lives in oppressive physical, social, and political conditions, and is ruled by unresponsive and corrupt government.

Rebellion is the necessary result of injustice. It may not always achieve its purpose, or be intended to do so, but a conviction of injustice endured must precede articulate rebellion. Nor is it always certain that injustice will be followed by rebellion – it would be very much better for the world if this was the case. But where the victims of aggression or custom are ignorant and disunited, the opportunities for reasoned and effective revolt are practically reduced to nothing…

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

The Declaration of Independence was written by white men for white men.

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

What freedom am I being offered while the organization of the people remains banned? What freedom am I being offered when I may be arrested on a pass offence?...What freedom am I being offered when I need a stamp in my pass book to seek work? What freedom am I being offered when my very South African citizenship is not respected? Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts… I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free.

[Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.

There seem to be some persons who do not believe in freedom — for others. They fear that if the common people were free then they would not work for us, or obey us, or do as we think they ought to do. They are even called "lazy". Unhappily it is too true that we have many strains that seem to have become entirely exhausted, perhaps because of the over-work or the dissipation, or both, of their forbears. These people are literally "born tired".

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own time.