Oppression Cycle Quotes

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other fastened about his own neck.

Who is the descendant of the slavemasters a descendant of slaves to fight other people in thier own country?

If we were to drive out the English with the weapons with which they enslaved us, our slavery would still be with us even when they have gone.

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow--the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago

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.

In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both

A Dalit needs Jupiter's escape velocity to achieve success.

As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder than it's taken off you and swapped for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the crown jewels.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals--just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.

History is replete with ideologies of freedom, justice, liberation of the downtrodden and the exploited, that have been turned against the very people they had mobilised, or that have reproduced the same logic of exclusion and terror toward those whom they claimed to set free.

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage for holding the slave.