Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess Salisbury Quotes

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.

Obviously, I have certain policy positions that I push and advocate for that would benefit people dealing in a system that breeds inequality and makes life more difficult for people.

We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.

The Reagan program is not working because the program is not fair - and, just as important, because the people themselves know it is not fair.

No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.

I think what we forget is that everybody loses when we keep unnecessary privilege. The cost to society overall is much greater.

With any sort of minority, issues of ostracization or misrepresentation are clearly rampant. It's just so deeply rooted in our culture, and there are so many levels that it trickles down from.

We can't continue to sit on our hands and sit idly by as people are being brutalized, disenfranchised, and left out of the system.

Year after year, politicians have drafted huge piles of legislation on the assumption that most people are not good. And we know the consequences of that policy: inequality, loneliness and mistrust.

Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated.

So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.

What people don't know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

It would be a tragic mistake for us out here to imagine that Bush represents the hearts and the minds of the majority of your countrymen. Many of your black and other compatriots must be just as anguished as we are.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.

All oppression creates a state of war.

I'm tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.