Resisting Oppression Quotes

Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse fate, you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

I know how tough it is to stand up to powerful forces that prey on consumers.

Do the people of this land…desire to preserve those [liberties] protected by the First Amendment… If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanquished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch for a saving hand while yet there was time.

I am not ready to give up this country without a fight.

Let me say for the record, I am not a gangster and never have been. I'm not the thief who grabs your purse. I'm not the guy who jacks your car. I'm not down with the people who steal and hurt others. I'm just a brother who fight back.

To permit ourselves to be provoked into violence would mean defeating ourselves; our real power is in our solidarity and our capacity to endure suffering rather than to give up the fight for the right to organize; no one can weave wool with machine guns; that cheerfulness was better for morale than bitterness and that therefore we would smile as we passed the machine guns and the police on the way from the hall to the picket lines around the mills.

But if President Trump's policies continue to negatively affect Wisconsin families, I won't cater to his demands or waver from my position. I will not be a doormat. I will fight for our state, our families and our values.

I loved creating a series about the four Cabot sisters, who were not content to let their destinies be dictated to them. In 'The Trouble With Honor,' this desire became especially urgent when the sisters were faced with the prospect of losing their place in society. Eldest sister Honor led the charge. They were undaunted!

The really nice thing with 'Future Past' is that you actually have a superhero film - much to everyone's surprise, I will hope - that is about something. It's about racism, I hope. It's about resisting oppression. It's about fighting for freedom and the cost of fighting for freedom.

I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more.

The only thing I can do is continue to defend myself.

Pablo Casals is a very great artist. What I admire is the firm stand he has taken not only against the oppressors of his countrymen, but also against those opportunists who are always ready to compromise with the Devil. He perceives clearly that the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.

Examine what is around you and see that princes and masters have power over your body alone, not over your soul, and always keep this in mind. Why when they order, say, to kill or to do something else, inappropriate, unrighteous and harmful for the soul, it is not proper to obey them, even though they torture your body. God has created the soul free and self-ruled, and it is free to do as it wills, good or bad

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

At times we feel wounded, hurt, disappointed, disgusted, resentful, sick of it all. At other times we feel skeptical, outraged, robbed, beaten. We chafe, hate, overlook. Then again we feel like ignoring, defying and fighting for every right that belongs to us as human beings.

If we won't fight injustice wherever we see it, then we are not safe from suffering injustice ourselves.

liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.

I don't fight fascists because I'll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

You don't fight injustice by asking to become part of the system that committed the injustice against you in the first place. That's like a freed slave striving to become a slave owner.

I seek … the means to fight injustice. To turn fear against those who prey on the fearful.

The most important thing my grandfather taught me was that the most noble way to use your skills, intellect and energy is to defend the marginalized against those with the greatest power - and that the resulting animosity from those in power is a badge of honor.

The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, If we must die, O let us nobly die.