Oppressive Language Quotes & Sayings

Rational order in the technological world can be as fascinating as the fetishes of a Congo witch-doctor - scientific phenomena become significant images. — Eduardo Paolozzi

The future historian will rank him as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century.

{Stanton's opinion of the great Robert Ingersoll} — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

He caressed my cheek.
"You came for me," I whispered.
"Always," he told me. — Ilona Andrews

If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American. — Rich Lowry

You get nothing done if you don't listen to each other. — Barbara Bush

Alessandra wrote:

To label this book "Dr. Seuss" is too much.
He never yet wrote it, nor genius it touched.
It's flat, it's pedantic, it leaves children bored,
The very things Teddy S. Geisel abhorred.
Go read some real Dr. Seuss if you wish.
Let these hand-puppet zombies drone on about fish. — Bonnie Worth

I have great parents, and they both taught me great things, but my formative years were boundaryless. — Roseanne Barr

Indeed, the example of Jesus to Allah is like that of Adam. He created Him from dust; then He said to him, "Be," and he was. — Qur'an

Language has everything to do with oppression and liberation. When the word "victory" means conquer vs. harmony and the word "equality" means homogenization vs. unity in/through diversity, then the liberation of a people from a "minority" class to "communal stakeholders" becomes much more difficult. Oppression has deep linguistic roots. We see it in conversations which interchange the idea of struggle with suffering in order to normalize abuse. We are the creators of our language, and our definitions shape the perceptions we have of the world. The first step to ending oppression is finding a better method of communication which is not solely dependent on a language rooted in the ideology of oppressive structures. — Cristina Marrero

The truck went on its way in the night and Gedaleh shouted, laughing, If not this way, how? And if not now, when? — Primo Levi

If a betting game among a certain number of participants I played long enough, eventually one player will have all the money. If there is any skill involved, it will accelerate the process of concentrating all the stakes in a few hands. Something like this happens in the market. There is a persistent overall tendency for equity to flow from the many to the few. In the long run, the majority loses. The implication for the trader is that to win you have to act like the minority. If you bring normal human habits and tendencies to trading, you'll gravitate toward the majority and inevitably lose. — William Eckhardt

It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren der Natur. — George Santayana

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. — Toni Morrison

Then I wake up. And, it's not the purple- hued light of the house at three in the morning that has woken me, or the sound of Payton stumbling into the bathroom. It's a hand.
A single hand.
So innocuous.
I feel it before my eyes blink open. A slight weight on my hip. A current of electricity running through me, reshaping the air that I breathe. It takes only a second for me to process what it is, to rearrange the spaces in my head around the feel of his fingers on my body. — Autumn Doughton

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. — Roland Barthes