Top 340 Oppressive Quotes & Sayings - Page 2
Explore popular Oppressive quotes.
Last updated on April 17, 2025.
Feminists declare that men and women are equal in all respects. They petulantly decry any atavistic male courtesy towards females as a relic of a still oppressive patriarchal culture.
I myself hate the communist North Korean system. That doesn't mean I should let the people in the North suffer under an oppressive regime.
Religion, throughout the years, has become a very oppressive thing that doesn't allow people to get to know the God it was created to try to lead them to.
We have a duty to show up in the world with meaning and purpose and commitment to doing good. And to use any privilege that we have to make positive change and to disrupt oppressive systems.
When the forces are aligning against hybridity, it harms everyone, as we are all migrants. Growing up in Pakistan, I know just how oppressive that kind of puritanical mindset can be.
Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said "thou shalt not," and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code.
When I take up my pen to write, I feel the strength of standing up and refusing to be silent. In an oppressive situation, silence is death.
In human history who hold the reigns of political power, and there are some women who were very much a team player during their husband's oppressive regime.
Will you stop drinking whiskey? Let me plead with you to do so. And if the sisters would not think it oppressive, I would ask them to not drink quite so much strong tea.
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.
It's interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they're reduced to the barest terms of survival. That's what provides tension in a lot of films.
For me, growing up as an activist under an oppressive dictatorship in Uganda, the U.N. was a friend to those of us who fought our way to freedom, as it was for the millions who joined decolonization struggles in the African continent.
Muslims have their own traditions. The important point to bear in mind is that the whole Muslim tradition is totally and unequivocally opposed to autocratic and oppressive government. This is very, very clear.
Los Angeles was great fun because it was the polar opposite of Moscow in 1980. It was sunny and bright, lots of colours around, whereas Moscow was dark and oppressive.
I recall the night that President McKinley died. I was working at the time at a theatre in St. Louis. The oppressive feeling was in the air. I could not make the people laugh.
I am at the moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold.
The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it's in public or somewhere, and it's just, how inconvenient that that's there. It takes up so much room, and it's so oppressive.
I wanted to talk about women artists but I wanted to depart from the biopic dynamic, that trope where a strong woman succeeds in a very oppressive world. This idea that 'it can happen if you want.'
The suburbs are incredibly oppressive. I actually believe that the suburbs are much more dangerous than the ghettos.
I know my kids best. I know what morals and values are right for my children. I think we should not have an oppressive state telling us what to do.
The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.
What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence - as it saves most writers who live in 'interesting' oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.
To me, when you're at a hotel and your home environment is ultimately dictated by somebody else, I always find that a little bit oppressive and scary in a way.
I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. Its always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact its so supple and sly.
People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots.
There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God.
Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home.
Across the country, universities that had abandoned in loco parentis in the 1960s because it was too oppressive and intrusive have replaced it with in loco Big Brother programs of political and cultural re-education.
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.
Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression.
...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.
Revolutions are not exportable: revolutions are created by oppressive conditions which Latin American countries exercise against their peoples.
The power of collecting money from the people is not to be rejected because it has sometimes been oppressive. Public credit is as necessary for the prosperity of a nation as private credit is for the support and wealth of a family.
Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.
...the greatest political problem facing the world today is...how to curb the oppressive power of government, how to keep it within reasonable bounds.
The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised.
Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.
To demand that people find their assigned narrow corridors of culture or ethnicity or gender, expecting people to forevermore stay in that lane, is to limit our human potential. It's oppressive.
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.
Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition.
Many people in the West do not realise how oppressive some Muslim states are - both for men and for women. This is a cultural issue, not an Islamic one.
To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won't keep on that way.
I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.
The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
I've enjoyed, to a certain extent, any country I've been in, of course like Serbia and Croatia can be very restrictive and oppressive, and frustrating, but they're still very beautiful.
Americans get fooled because we think we're trying to help the peasants down there in El Salvador, even though we're propping up that oppressive government, among the most brutal and militaristic in the world.
When you're convinced that you're right and you believe that you have the license to do anything because you're right, you can be bossy and you can be dangerous. You can be oppressive. You can be a tyrant.
There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.
Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?
Nothing is so oppressive as a secret: women find it difficult to keep one long; and I know a goodly number of men who are women in this regard.
Unilateral sanctions on Cuba have been oppressive and largely ineffective, and that's why the public largely supports lifting them.
To return after long years of painful absence to some place which has been the scene of our former joys, and whence the force of circumstance, and not choice, has driven us, is oppressive to the heart.
I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.
You walk into the Beeb and it is very, very white. That is not anybody's fault. You can be in an oppressive institution and not be an oppressor.
Did we risk our lives to defend a just society, where guilt must be proven and not assumed? Or are we no better than the oppressive kings from whom our fathers fled?
This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.
Enjoy what thou has inherited from thy sires if thou wouldn't really possess it. What we employ and use is never an oppressive burden; what the moment brings forth, that only can it profit by.
