William Pinkney Quotes

Oppression is the essence of power.

It is necessary to be very intelligent in the work of oppression.

Why do you all push us around?

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.

All oppression creates a state of war.

The history of most countries has been that of majorities—mounted majorities, clad in iron, armed with death, treading down the tenfold more numerous minorities.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

When the white man turns tyrant [colonialism], it is his own freedom he destroys.

As men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might.

Guys like the Monarch are not unique, and there are guys like him all over the world torturing dumb scientists.

Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things - once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

Feelings of marginalization and cries of separation are symptomatic of countries where rulers find power sweet and intoxicating, where power is coveted, and when acquired, painstakingly guarded.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

There is a kind of theme that runs through the modern world that human relationships should be looked at in terms of power relationships, in terms of the manipulation of power. That is one of the really wicked ways of looking at the world. It strips people of their humanness.

People who bear the brunt of dominant economic and military power have always resented, even hated, the subordination they experience while admiring grudgingly the institutions that sustain the subordination.

Will the American People Never Cease to Oppress and Torture the Helpless poor?

Those who exercise power always arrange matters so as to give their tyranny the appearance of justice.

At what point do the oppressed become the oppressors?