Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

Those who have no sense of right, reason or religion, have a natural propensity to make use of their strength to the destruction of such as are weaker than they.

Turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

In every human society, there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the height of power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery. The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort and to diffuse their influence universally and equally.

The things that make me very angry are injustice and bullying. If I see someone bullying a woman or child in the street, or kicking a dog, I go completely mad.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

When I was old enough to realize all meat was killed, I saw it as an irrational way of using our power, to take a weaker thing and mutilate it. It was like the way bullies would take control of younger kids in the schoolyard.

As there is oppression of the majority such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred.

One Law for the Lion and the Ox is oppression.

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely

No one will have mercy on those who cannot defend themselves in the Middle East.

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

If a king did not, without tiring, inflict punishment on those deserving to be punished, the stronger would roast the weaker like fish on a spit.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors….This inequality has no other source but the abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.

It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil.

Six "social sins" which Jesus bore on the Cross: Religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit and mob action, militarism, and class contempt.

There is a great fear of our Union -- a fear that I do not fully understand, but that I know is present...What is it that causes some men to act so hastily and so cruelly? It cannot be that we are so powerful. Is it so much to ask that the poorest people of the land have a measure of justice?

Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security, and prestige, it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege.

In this world, people are violent toward people that they feel are conceptualized as smaller than them. It's an impulse that we have.

It's always important, when we experience injustice in this nation, that people in power understand that we will not take that injustice quietly.