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Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

What I have realized is I cannot guarantee the absence of discrimination or hatred or prejudice, but I can guarantee the presence of justice.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Too often, systems of oppression turn those who are the targets of the oppression against one another.

I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.