Jean Genet Quotes

Out of the huts of history's shame I rise.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity.

You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.

Fear is the first obstacle we have to get over in our battle for freedom

Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.

Every day, I feel like it's the day I was freed from Daesh. Every time I speak about my story, I feel like it's the day I was liberated.

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.

When you deprive people of their right to live in dignity, to hope for a better future, to have control over their lives, when you deprive them of that choice, then you expect them to fight for these rights.

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

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation.

In that first blow to the deaf walls of those who have everything, the blood of our people, our blood, ran generously to wash away injustice. To live, we die. Our dead once again walked the way of truth. Our hope was fertilized with mud and blood.

I hear music that comes out of need, out of grief, sorrow, suffering and out of overcoming these things, as well. That journey to freedom still goes on today. It's an incremental change, the culmination of many events in your own life and the lives of your children and grandchildren.

Fear clogs; faith liberates.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

From deep in the slave hut is somebody calling over 150 years to all of our experiences and all of our ideas on human respect, and all of our ideas on dignity. And I felt like that's just incredibly powerful.

One of the most important functions of jazz has been to encourage a hope for freedom, for people living in situations of intolerance or struggle.

Movements begin when oppressed people make - and keep remaking - a deeply inward decision to stop consenting to external demands that contradict a critical inner truth, the truth that they are worthy of respect.

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

We must remember that the people for whom this change represents a first taste of freedom and a new and brighter future did not allow their resolution to falter, no matter how great the suffering by which they bought this independence.

In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles - the oppression of tyranny - to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

No one can live under degradation.