“The intellectual's temptation is to be not on the side of the oppressed, but against the oppressor.”— Raymond Aron
“The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”— Frantz Fanon
“I think that we've gotten to a place where we think that being offended is the same as being oppressed.”— D. L. Hughley
“As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.”— Marian Anderson
“The State is a vast slaughterhouse, and a graveyard, where all the living aspirations and forces of a country come to be slain and buried.”— Mikhail Bakunin
“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”— James Baldwin
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”— Walter Benjamin
“The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.”— Steve Biko
“The establishment has an interest in pretending that the oppressed are not men.”— Alexander Comfort
“Slavery is a form of parasitism, and for a parasite to thrive, its host must be kept alive.”— Adam Hochschild
“Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma paralyzes.”— bell hooks
“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them.”— Emily Brontë
“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don't see it, but because they see it and they don't want it to exist.”— bell hooks