I'm not interested in who suffered the most. I'm interested in people getting over it.
A lot of authority figures want to be good. I sense that, and yet at the same time I sense that authority, after a while, always leads to some kind of oppression. When the minority report comes in, what you do is run the minority out of town with a flaming cross. It's just the way things are.
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
Being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression, otherwise I would have been free to be so much more.
. . . all human beings have a right, and duty, to be joyful. Anything that thwarts this spiritual human right goes against the very purpose of human being. Spirituality mandates us to wage a relentless war to eradicate these forces of oppression and disempowerment.
McEwan's Atonement…truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past…. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel…. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes — the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression — into his narrative, and in a magical love scene.
They say that oppression engenders hate. They are heard on all sides crying hate hate.
What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?
A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. … I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Oppression is more easily endured than insult.
The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others.
The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.
As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country.
Fear is the greatest form of oppression. The best way to rise up in protest is to live your life to its fullest!
We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.
An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.
The Khodorkovsky case is typical of the "oprichnina" - the system of oppression.
Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state - leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression.