Roy Harper Quotes

When a system of oppression has become institutionalized it is unnecessary for individuals to be oppressive.

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.

Will the American People Never Cease to Oppress and Torture the Helpless poor?

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

All oppression creates a state of war.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

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

There is a kind of theme that runs through the modern world that human relationships should be looked at in terms of power relationships, in terms of the manipulation of power. That is one of the really wicked ways of looking at the world. It strips people of their humanness.

All the households of the poor are not equally submissive

By us, and not for us

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.

We have a tendency in life to be afraid of our oppressors.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted.

I think 'Humans' is more about provoking the idea that there is a class of beings in society that we treat as less than... as subordinates; people who we treat badly and take for granted. Often they are the same people who work hard to keep the city going. We need to think about that.

You don't fight injustice by asking to become part of the system that committed the injustice against you in the first place. That's like a freed slave striving to become a slave owner.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

The Left not only needs a victim class, it has proven adept at inventing new victim classes as a means of exacerbating social conflict.

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

Aristocracy is always cruel.

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.

The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.