Oppressed people

“ Men in a state of freedom instinctively question the right of others to impose unequal burdens upon them, or to deny to them equal and exact protection of the laws. When oppressed people begin to murmur, grow restless and discontented, the opposer had better change his tactics, or lock himself up, as does the cowardly tyrant of Russia. ”

“ When people are really oppressed, their condition can generally be described in very plain terms connected with very plain things; with bread, with land, with taxes and children and churches. If imperialists and capitalists do thus oppress them, as they most certainly often do, then the condition of those more powerful persons can also be described in few and simple words ”

“ Now, the right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. But any people or part of a people who resort to this remedy, stake their lives, their property, and every claim for protection given by citizenship—on the issue. Victory, or the conditions imposed by the conqueror—must be the result. ”

“ It is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doer to light. ”

“ still retaining your Utopian visions of female felicity? To talk of our happiness!—ours, the ill-used and oppressed! You remind me of the ancient tyrant, who, seeing his slaves sink under the weight of their chains, said 'Do look at the indolent repose of those people!'"
Mr. ”

“ The oppressors, that is, those who take part in government, and those who profit by oppression, that is, the rich, no longer imagine, as they once did, that they are the elect of the world, and that they constitute the ideal of human happiness and greatness, to attain which was once the highest aim of the oppressed. ”

“ I do but name these as extreme instances of the way in which, under institutions that nominally secuie men from oppression, they may be intolerably oppressed—unable to utter their opinions and to conduct their private lives as they please. ”

“ RISE OF ABOLITIONISM. Ever and anon in the world’s history there has been some one who has broken out as a living fountain of the free spirit of humanity, has given bold utterance to the pent-up thought of wrongs, too long endured, and has made the demand for some God-given right, until then withheld,—a demand so obviously just, that the tyrants of earth have trembled as if called to judgment, and the oppressed have rejoiced as at the voice of their deliverer. ”

“ I believe that the cruelty which now seems so common may, in some degree, be attributed to the oppression which its exercisers themselves suffer; for every one who has studied the human mind will agree with me, that, with few exceptions, the oppressed become the hardest of oppressors. ”

“ The oppressed are a great multitude. Three millions of souls are crushed and brutalized by slavery. Three millions of souls are robbed of every human right, and subjected to every abuse and cruelty that the caprice, lust, or cupidity of the slaveholder may dictate. ”

“ Recognizing the calamity that threatens them, their fear turns to defiance and hatred. They know that if they relax for one moment in this conflict with the oppressed, they are lost, because their slaves, already embittered, grow more and more so with every day's oppression. ”

“ But democracy and representative government undoubtedly make oppression less probable: they afford a means by which those who might be oppressed can cause their wishes and grievances to be publicly known, they render it certain that only a minority can be oppressed, and then only if the majority are nearly unanimous in wishing to oppress them. ”

“ It is to prevent and dissuade from acts of violence and injustice, and surely not to aggravate the sense of them, that such circumstances are noticed. Nay, it is charity towards the oppressors as well as the oppressed, to endeavor to convince the oppressors of their error—and how can this be done but by exhibiting the oppressions. ”

“ Society's laws and customs make them what they are. They must be so, or must be content to be of the oppressed classes. There are but two great classes in civilization,—the oppressed and the oppressors, the trampled upon and the tramplers. ”

“ It was natural that a sorely tried and oppressed nation should paint the oppressor in the blackest of colours. You are pleased with an anecdote like the above, showing that a gleam of pity sometimes crossed those truculent faces. ”

“ The ignorant and prejudiced promoters of this cruelty are still in a majority, and as long as I have strength remaining and a voice to plead the cause of the helpless and oppressed, you will ever find me in the foremost ranks of those who would strike down oppressors and discomfit the schemes of our ruthless and unscrupulous adversaries. ”

“ Do you, in your heart, believe that you are justified in going about the world preaching your hateful doctrines, seeking out the toilers only to fill them with discontent and to set them against their employers, preaching everywhere bloodshed and anarchy, inflaming the minds of people who in ordinary times are contented, even happy? You have made yourself feared and hated in every country of the world. You have brought America almost to the verge of revolution. ”

“ Such is the lot of oppressed humanity that it cannot keep its rights or regain them otherwise than by offerings painful and costly to sensitive hearts, sacrificing themselves entirely for the cause of freedom. ”

“ Will the oppressor let go the oppressed? Was there ever an instance? Can the annals of mankind exhibit one single example where rulers overcharged with power willingly let go the oppressed, though solicited and requested most earnestly? ”

“ Let them deliver up to the fury of an infatuated people the man who, for these twenty years, has been the adversary of oppression; who talked to the French of liberty, of Constitution, of resistance, when his base calumniators were at nurse in the court of despotism and suckled with the milk of overbearing prejudices. ”

“ Many timid persons everywhere, by such assertions and appeals, were deterred from yielding to the convictions which the self-evident truths, urged by the Abolitionists, awakened. Still the cause of the oppressed made visible progress in all parts of the non-slaveholding States. ”

“ Whether the oppressed and despairing bondman, no longer able to repress his deep yearnings for manhood, or the tyrant, in his pride and impatience, takes the initiative, and strikes the blow for a firmer hold and a longer lease of oppression, the result is the same,—society is instructed, or may be. ”

“ Some cherished institution seems to be threatened. Some nationality supposed—very likely erroneously—to be of the same flesh and blood as ourselves, appears—very likely on faulty information—to be unjustly oppressed. ”

“ Those who suffer wrong from the more powerful. They are to be found in all conditions of society, in the bosom even of the family and the church. All relationships which involve authority are liable to be abused to the infliction of injustice and outrage.
Who are THE OPPRESSED, distinctively? The enslaved. These differ from all other victims of abused power in this essential point, that, by the law, they are regarded not as men, but things, the property of men. Denied humanity, they are denied all human rights, and excluded from all human relations. ”

“ We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. ”

“ The struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors will be merely nominal if the oppressed are enlightened and animated by a distinct and powerful apprehension of their object. “The minority perceive the approaches of the development of an irresistible force, by the influence of the public opinion of their weakness on those political forms, of which no government but an absolute despotism is devoid. They divest themselves of their usurped distinctions, and the public tranquillity is not disturbed by the revolution.” ”

“ Yet even then, such as live at ease, free of oppression who are blinded with prejudice at the oppressed, and bribed with the indulgence and lenity of the oppressors towards themselves, will look upon these actions as transports of madness, and effects of extravagant zeal, while they weigh them only in the scales of ordinary justice, and do not ponderate them in the ballance of necessitated virtue ”

“ Ages of oppression could not be hurled off thus suddenly, without horrible carnage. But there, it was the people against a government—white men struggling against white men. In a mighty effort to upheave the foundations of despotism, the people grew mad. ”

“ I am in particular too much oppressed:—for, in my neighbourhood we are of late by the long libertinage of our civil wars grown old in so riotous a form of state, that in earnest 'tis a wonder how it can subsist. ”

“ We have challenged oppression to show us its might;
We have strutted for years through the world as a race
That for God and for country, earth’s tyrants would face;
Now the gage is flung down, hate is loosed in the world. ”

“ It is astonishing how a people who so much value themselves upon their Freedom can continue in the practice of so much oppression. Will not the groans of this afflicted and miserable people reach Heaven! ”

“ He comes forward therefore, while he declares himself an eternal and uncompromising enemy to all cruelty, injustice, tyranny, and oppression, not against, but for liberty—not against, but for the coloured man—not against, but for humanity. ”

“ When words are sought by which to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised in the most odious manner, and all other comparisons are found inadequate, the despots are said to be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the human race, by way of stamping on them the most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. ”

“ All an infernal system of oppression, like the sweating system, asks, is to be let alone. To uncover its atrocities is like turning over a huge stone in the meadow in springtime, that has been a hiding-place for bugs and worms that nest away in the dark. ”

“ We can well understand and appreciate how, in a country ruled by a despot, whose heel of oppression and tyranny is ever on the necks of the down-trodden people, the masses, desiring some measure of free action and equality, would revolt against these conditions, and seek a reorganization of society. ”

“ What makes matters worse is that, when the public mind is invoked (as, to its credit, the English mind is extremely open to be) in the name of justice and philanthropy in behalf of the subject community or race, there is the same probability of its missing the mark; for in the subject community also there are oppressors and oppressed—powerful individuals or classes, and slaves prostrate before them ”

“ Bear my contempt of oppressors.
Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,
Go to the women in suburbs. ”

“ With every hand raised against him in the old land and the new, in the land of his hoped-for freedom, what more logical than that his should be turned against society that seems to exist only for his oppression? ”

“ Can you be quite sure that the oppressed laborers in this country, white and colored, will not some day make common cause and learn some of the dangerous modes of protest against injustice adopted in other countries? ”

“ On every opportune occasion they appealed to the world in behalf of the oppressed race, which the hostile laws had removed from humanizing influences, reduced to the plane of beasts, and made to die in heathenism. ”

“ Remember the oppression of the living, who with heart-break and death-wounds, are treading their mournful way in bitter anguish and despair across burning desert sands, with parched soul and shriveled minds, with piteous thirsts, and terrible tortures of body and spirit. Weep for them, weep for yourselves too, if ye will, but learn to hate, ay, to hate with such hatred as blazes within me, the wicked slave-system and the wickeder white men who oppress and wrong us thus. ”

“ They are kept in darkness, and are borne down under a cruel, cruel oppression! All human rights are denied them as citizens! They are not recognized as men! My old master frequently said, “he did not believe a d——d nigger had any soul!” They are made to undergo everything as a beast. ”

“ Oppression guards the golden promise, and servile brutality is the only earnest of success. Then like a clarion note in the desert sounds the call of the Ideal. Strong and rousing rolls the battle-cry of Revolution. ”

“ As your past was for Freedom, so be your hereafter;
And through all your coming years
May no weak race be wronged, and no strong robber feared;
To oppressors grow hateful, to slaves more endeared ”