Rigoberta Menchu Quotes

I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck.

The great appear great to us only because we are on our knees;, LET US RISE!

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

In all the Arab countries I have been in, the people have said that they were not demonstrating for food. They wanted dignity.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

Fear is the greatest form of oppression. The best way to rise up in protest is to live your life to its fullest!

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping, do not wake him lest he be dreaming of freedom. I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him freedom.

You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.

When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.

Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.

There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.

I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.

Emancipation - what is meant by it? Simply that the slaves shall cease to be held as property and shall henceforth be held and treated as human beings. Simply, that we should take our feet from off their necks.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

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.

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

A group oppressed, is a group enslaved ….Whenever a group, a community of people, in unison, feels that it is being oppressed, and that it wants to control its destiny, then that community has a moral right to seek effective redress, or demand to control its own destiny as appropriate

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.

A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own choice, is often the means of their regeneration.

I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. My address is like my shoes; it travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

Whether a miracle draws me out of here or I have to present myself on a scaffold, liberty and equality will be my first and last words…