In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Who wants to live in a world where you can only stay in the lane of your birth?
We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.
Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out.
The rude, raw, 'let it all hang out' freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.
If you live in an oppressive society, you've got to be resilient. You can't let each little thing crush you. You have take every encounter and make yourself larger, rather than allow yourself to be diminished by it.
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Why hast thou made me born in this country, The inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave?
Get in the race car do what I do then go home. We don't have freedom to do anything anymore.
'Dystopian,' by definition, promises a darker story.
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
I was born in Tehran at a time when women's rights were deteriorating at a rampant rate. My parents didn't want to raise their daughter in a social, political, and religious climate that was growing increasingly oppressive toward women and girls, so they emigrated to London. But the struggle of the Iranian people was permanently etched in my social consciousness from a young age.
Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience.
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.
'Child 44' has no room for inconsequential choices because Stalinist Russia had no room for them, either.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.
It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed, they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage, but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society. Civil disobedience can utilize the militance wasted in riots to seize clothes or groceries many do not even want.
