Oppressive Structures Quotes

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

You can't come out on a record dissing the system and be on a label that's connected to the system.

I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.

Some people, with a certain nostalgia, the worshippers and admirers of the colonial system, cherish and nurse its structures instead of smashing them. This is typical of a mentality in bondage to decadent values, negative values - counter-revolutionary values.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

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.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

I so totally refuse to 'make an effort to understand' the people who have become vectors for a fascist spectacular politics.

When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.

To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.

But you know, the system almost destroyed itself while it was goin' on trying to destroy us.

The point of privilege and the notion of mansplaining is that sometimes I definitely feel like I should shut up. That's it functioning. That's the notion of privilege functioning.

I've never really subscribed to the theory that repression breeds rebellion. I don't think that's really true.

Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.

It is a wrong form of government we are living under, and we, the workers stand for the overthrow of the whole damnable institution.

You shall not pile, with servile toil, Your monuments upon my breast, Nor yet within the common soil, Lay down the wreck of power to rest...

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

Oppression has no logic--just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system.