“Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”

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Audre Lorde72

writer and activist 1934–1992

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“The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same — whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation. This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there more than two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and mentally, find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious morality. … the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which, by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct, and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudoreligion and pseudoscience and the immoral conclusions deduced from them, commonly called "civilization."”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), I

“Don't expect them to fully understand you. They won't: So? Demonstrate with results what they would not understand with words!”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

“Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book The Little Prince

Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications.
Le Petit Prince (1943)

“And I will not ask what all others ask of you - why? Because what I have come to understand is that there is no why. To ask why is to impose expectations on mute existence - expectations it is in no way obliged to meet or even extend. And so I make no more, ask no more.”

Ian Cameron Esslemont book Return of the Crimson Guard

Return of the Crimson Guard (2008)

“We’re always a victim of our fears, if we can convey them and have people understand them, maybe we can help them protect themselves from their fears.”

Christian Duguay (director) (1957) Canadian film director

“The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter, while US Congressman, to his friend and law-partner William H. Herndon, opposing the Mexican-American War (15 February 1848)
1840s
Context: Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us" but he will say to you, "Be silent; I see it, if you don't."
The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

“America’s media seem utterly lacking in introspection. Do they understand why so many people hate them so? Do they care? Are they so smugly self-righteous and self-regarding they cannot see?”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"Trump & the Press — A Death Struggle" http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-press-death-struggle-125720 (September 19, 2016), Patrick J. Buchanan <br class="br">2010s

“If people need a book to tell them that in marriage kindness and forbearance are necessary, and that the sexual act is happier when it is undertaken to give pleasure as well as to receive it, these books are what they want. Possibly people so lacking in understanding of themselves and others do not mind being addressed in the coarse, grainy prose of the marriage counselor.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

“As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.”

Ernest Renan (1823–1892) French philosopher and writer

Orlando, in Caliban, act 2, sc. 1 (1878).

“Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”

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Audre Lorde72

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