Opal Tometi Quotes

We can't continue to sit on our hands and sit idly by as people are being brutalized, disenfranchised, and left out of the system.

Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed.

Inequality causes problems by creating fissures in societies, leaving those at the bottom feeling marginalized or disenfranchised.

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slaver's scars, I am the Red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same ole stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.

Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice.

Oppression is as American as apple pie.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

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.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.