A Quote by William E. Gladstone

The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.

William E. Gladstone

Quote Topics

Degree Less Majority Minority Odious Only Oppression

Quote Author

William E. Gladstone
British - Leader
December 29, 1809 - May 19, 1898

As there is oppression of the majority such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred.

Bram Fischer

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Virginia Woolf

People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.

Randall Jarrell

Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way - defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.

Edwin Percy Whipple

We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.

Nawal El Saadawi

If it doesn't happen, the continuing oppression will be met by more resistance from a less tolerant populace which wants a democratic restoration. And that resistance will only invite further oppression.

Florencio Abad

We have two kinds of oppression. Oppression that is universal - everyone in Iran is subject to it. But everyone has also their own, unique way of experiencing this oppression.

Akbar Ganji

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Ayn Rand

We are told that this is an odious and unpopular tax. I never knew a tax that was not odious and unpopular with the people who paid it.

John Sherman

I look at him. "It's odious," he says. "Detention?" I ask, confused. "Huh?" We have no idea what the other is talking about. "What's odious?" I ask. "O.D.S," he says, pointing to his discman and obviously referring to some dropkick band. Like I really care.

Melina Marchetta

Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

Eleanor Holmes Norton

Women are suffering because they are being excluded. The high military council excluded women from the committee to change the constitution [of Egypt]. We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.

Nawal El Saadawi

Violent resistance against the power of the state is the last resort of the minority in its effort to break loose from the oppression of the majority. ... The citizen must not be so narrowly circumscribed in his activities that, if he thinks differently from those in power, his only choice is either to perish or to destroy the machinery of state.

Ludwig von Mises

"Oppression" or "systems of oppression" operate as a shorthand terms in much writing and speaking so that we do not have to list all these systems of meaning and control each time (i.e. racism, ableism, xenophobia, etc.). I needed a term like that, but "oppression" implies a kind of top-down understanding of power that is at odds with the Foucaultian model I rely on in my work.