A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
All oppression creates a state of war.
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.
Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
First we kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, the undecided.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
In Germany they came first for the Communist, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn't stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband — it creeps up insidiously… step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realizes that it is gone.
Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans.
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords. Lords without anger and honor, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labor and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?