Rita Dove Quotes

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

Those who have had no share in the good fortunes of the mighty often have a share in their misfortunes.

A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune. and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated. but the difficulties of established prejudice: the man dies, but his memory lives

The evils that arise to us from the structure of the material universe are neither trivial nor few, yet the history of political society sufficiently shows that man is, of all other beings, the most formidable enemy to man.

It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that animals should prey upon each other.

Brother! We have, as your friends, fought by your side, and have poured out our blood in your defense, but our arms are now broken. You have grown large. My people have become small, and there are none who take pity on them.

Concubinage, which is voluntary on the part of the slaves, and permissive on that of the master…in reality, is the relation, to which these people have ever been practically restricted, and with which alone, perhaps, their condition is compatible.

Those in power write the history; those who suffer write the songs.

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

We have a tendency in life to be afraid of our oppressors.

Many people thought, like I did, that it was disgusting that somehow or another a profession could deem a person other than a human being.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

Dominion by land or sea will appear equally destitute of attraction, when it comes to be generally understood, that all its advantages rest with the rulers, and that the subjects at large derive no benefit whatever.

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 convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.

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?

The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved

Instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. "Might makes right," and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

How long can we keep kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?

The quest for some unmistakable proof of superior status and identity replaces the ideal of success for many .... the history of modernization is largely one of carnage and bedlam rather than peaceful convergence.

Rules about what you can and can’t say often have unintended consequences. … In everything we do, we need to make sure we’re empowering people, not simply reinforcing existing institutions and power structures.

I spent a long time reporting on trans issues, and I know in the course of that reporting I saw how deeply adversity runs.

As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder than it's taken off you and swapped for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the crown jewels.

The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.

I think the best science fiction, especially literature, is political in nature and is often an allegory about something problematic in our world, and it's something that makes the 'X-Men' comics so relevant - they're about xenophobia and prejudice.