
“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”
History and Utopia (1960)
From "In Defense of Self-defense" I (June 20, 1967)
To Die For The People
“Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.”
History and Utopia (1960)
Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)
The Quran calls on the weak and oppressed to gain strength http://english.bayynat.org/TheHolyQuran/Quran_QuranCalls.htm
Address to the United Nations (1964)
“Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”
Source: I Know This Much Is True
"On the Uses of a Landed Gentry" address in Edinburgh (6 November 1876), published in Short Studies on Great Subjects, Vol. III (1893), p. 406
Context: The landlord may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The Russian government has been called despotism tempered with assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination.
Unfortunately the wrong man was generally assassinated. The true criminal was an absentee, and his agent was shot instead of him. A noble lord living in England, two of whose agents had lost their lives already in his service, ordered the next to post a notice in his Barony that he intended to persevere in what he was doing, and if the tenants thought they would intimidate him by shooting his agents, they would find themselves mistaken.
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.”
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life