Advocacy for the Oppressed Quotes

Take sides. Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed.

The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Hatred of injustice is not the same thing as a love for everyday people.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor.

There was no one left to speak for me.

When you say that [Martin Luther] King was a prophet, you don't say that he predicted anything; you say that he bore witness. He left a committed life so that people would never forget the suffering of people that he was connected to. King was prophetic because he lived a committed life. Now he did critique society, saying you're going to go under if you don't treat your poor right. I mean, that is part of prophetic calling, but it's not predicting anything.

Martin Luther King wanted to be morally consistent and speak out against various things that were wrong, not just racism.

I'm going to speak the truth when I'm asked about it. This isn't for look. This isn't for publicity or anything like that. This is for people that don't have the voice.

When we struggle for human rights, for freedom, for dignity, when we feel that it is a ministry of the church to concern itself for those who are hungry, for those who have no schools, for those who are deprived, we are not departing from God's promise. He comes to free us from sin, and the church knows that sin's consequences are all such injustices and abuses. The church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things.

There is work to do; that is why I cannot stop or sit still. As long as a child needs help, as long as people are not free, there will be work to do. As long as an elderly person is attacked or in need of support, there is work to do. As long as we have bigotry and crime, we have work to do.

The distinctive mark of the Christian, today more than ever, must be love for the poor, the weak, the suffering.

The duty I owe to the slave, to truth, and to God, demands that I should use my pen and tongue so long as life and health are vouchsafed to me to employ them, or until the last chain shall fall from the limbs of the last slave in America and the world.

It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed-this, despite the gospel.

My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

I am the voice of the voiceless; Through me the dumb shall speak. Till the deaf world's ears be made to hear. The wrongs of the wordless weak. And I am my brothers keeper, And I will fight his fights; And speak the words for beast and bird. Till the world shall set things right.

It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed - who cannot speak for themselves.

Do you know why this world is as bad as it is?... It is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light... My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

The Jesus I follow is the peacemaker, is one who says forgive your enemies, who worries about the poor, who worries about the poorest of the poor instead of the richest of the rich.

If the Pope urged the Western nations to rescue persecuted Christians in the Middle East, I would back him wholeheartedly.

I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice.

For me, I'll always stand up for the disenfranchised, and I'm going to make a big point of that. I'm not a protest singer as such, you know? After the endurance course of the early 70s and 60s, I don't want to become one of them twats. But you got to learn to speak the truth.

My soul refuses to be satisfied so long as it is a helpless witness of a single wrong or a single misery.

I think if people really read Martin Luther King, Jr., then they would begin to understand what he really represented. The philosophy that he developed, of course, he was greatly influenced by Gandhi and Jesus Christ.