Emily Bronte Quotes

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim to the top

Aristocracy is always cruel.

Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.

Oppression is more easily endured than insult.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.

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

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

The masses in this country [Spain] are not like your Americans, nor even like the British. They are slave stock. They are good for nothing but slaves and only when they are used as slaves are they happy.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

The possession of power does not necessarily imply its unrighteous or oppressive use, although it generally awakes suspicion.

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

The system under which we live is owned and operated by people who do not deserve to run the world.

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.

I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.