Steven Biko Quotes

When a wrong thought is told a thousand times and impressed on one’s brain, one starts feeling the falsehood as truth. Similarly if the mind of slave is hammered of slavery, he starts enjoying his slavery

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

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

Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

When you're talking about an authority figure oppressing against people, it's the people that hold that authority figure up. If you want to get free of this bondage, then we need to think about ways to free ourselves rather than looking to the oppressors to free us.

Government oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source.

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

Don’t play with us. If you’re not going to give us justice, let us go so that we may help ourselves….We can’t want for benevolent white people to give us handouts.

I have come to the conclusion that the West is a vast lie machine for the secret agendas of vested interests.

The system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

'Indian policy' has now been brought down upon the American people, and the American people are the new Indians of the 21st Century.

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.

It doesn't matter who you vote for. It's still the same billionaires that run the world.

American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.

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.

Bondage is - subjection to external influences and internal negative thoughts and attitudes.

Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.