Douglas Coupland Quotes

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.

Unless you've been touched personally, it's difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you.

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.

Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.

Flagrant injustice, cruelty and oppression…if left unchecked will so multiply that the whole of the native border tribes will be provoked into a battle of dangerous exasperation.

Riot is the voice of the unheard.

For a long time in the United States, in practice if not in principle, only white, male, Protestants were born free and equal.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

America’s real majority is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc, because … they feel forgotten, at the second table behind the tightly organized smaller groups at either end of the U. S. spectrum.

We are at great risk in our democracy for failing to understand the great depths of poverty.

Oppression makes a wise man mad.

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stand up and protest.

Our nation's long neglect of minorities whose skin is dark is perhaps only a little worse than our neglect of another minority whose hair is white.

Poverty abides no line drawn by color or culture.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

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

If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.

New York Times, despite its liberal reputation, has been against the poor people of this earth.

The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors…. The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood/

Those who are most desperate for change are those who are the most powerless to effect it.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. the history of the capsulize era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their true culture destroyed...denied equal protection of the law, and deprived their rightful place in the respect of their fellows.