Joseph Brodsky Quotes

When you're in the minority, it doesn't matter what you're agenda is, you're not going to have the degree of freedom that you have as a member of the majority.

When you're the single French person in the middle of 10 Tunisians, the majority will impose their way of life on the minority.

In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness.

Till people find themselves greatly abused and oppressed by their governors, they are not apt to complain; and whenever they do, in fact, find themselves thus abused and oppressed, they must be stupid not to complain.

To a considerable degree, all minority groups suffer from the same state of marginality with its haunting consequences of insecurity, conflict, and irritation.

I would point out that the cultural advance of these people has been suppressed in the past and continues to be suppressed in the present by policies designed to keep them in ignorance.

The majority does not rule in America, but the minority shouldn't hijack it. And it's because we're afraid. They have isolated us and made us feel as though we're alone. We're not.

I want to take this opportunity to express, one more time, my deep sadness to those countrymen who feel, rightly, that they were victims of my government.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

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.

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.

The issue is the so-called educated few against the great democratic many.

At times those who won, 51 percent of the population claim the right to ride roughshod over the other 49 percent.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

All societies, including societies called democratic, are ruled by a minority.

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.

If the whites do not change, they will be kicked out of this country.

The working class is very under-represented in politics, literature, and everywhere else.

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late …. The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same — whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.

A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.

The minority makes every effort to delay business.

As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power.

We are supposed to all be equal before the law, but we have a separate and distinct ruling class, and that is wrong.

It is unhealthy to live in an environment where every aspect of our culture requires a great sort, where creative talents are for some but not for all, and where performing for the president of the United States becomes a point of regular and significant controversy.

It shouldn't be that people think the National Gallery is just for middle-class white people.