Breyten Breytenbach Quotes

What people don't know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

George W. Bush has helped those who have most, hurt those who have least and ignored everyone in between.

The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.

The Reagan program is not working because the program is not fair - and, just as important, because the people themselves know it is not fair.

I think what we forget is that everybody loses when we keep unnecessary privilege. The cost to society overall is much greater.

There is a great silver lining to the 45th presidency, which is, it's hard to swallow that he is existing, which gives us the silver lining, which is a great uncovering of the historical disenfranchisement and marginalization of so many people in this country for so long.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated.

Capitalism, racism and inhuman technocracy quietly develop in their own way. The causes of misery are no longer to be found in the inner attitudes of men, but have long been institutionalized.

I cannot be made into the commentator for the unspoken black masses.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

My father was the first to see through the schemes of the white man.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.

As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change.

Obviously, I have certain policy positions that I push and advocate for that would benefit people dealing in a system that breeds inequality and makes life more difficult for people.

Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.

I've completely lost faith in the Democratic Party to truly serve the disadvantaged.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.