Mental Oppression Quotes

To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.

‎A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

Communism feeds on aggression, hatred, and the imprisonment of men's minds and souls. This shall not take root in the United States.

India is one vast prison with high walls of suppression clothing her mind and her body.

There shall be no slavery of the mind.

I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.

Intellectual slavery ... will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.

Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.

What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.

The body oppressed by excesses bears down the mind, and depresses to the earth any portion of the divine spirit we had been endowed with.

The tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'

I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

There's no tyrant like a brain.

If any one age could be singled out as the worst in the history of Christendom, it would be the administration of Pope Pius XII, the most reactionary head of the most reactionary single force in the world - a force that binds men's minds, a force that divides them, a force that chains them so that they are unable to think and act for themselves.

In this country, popery finds its appropriate ally in the institution of slavery. They are both kindred systems. One enslaves the mind, the other both mind and body.

If we dwell in spirit, or Soul, we are living in happiness, for Soul is a happy entity. It is seldom anything else. When the mind presses in on it too strongly, however, it withdraws and leaves the body under the tyranny of mind.

Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.

How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”

Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. ...But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance), but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves