An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.
Confucius

Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.
James Madison

Every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.
Auberon Herbert

I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.
Oriana Fallaci

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
Thomas Jefferson

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision... is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.
Barbara Deming

In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.
Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
Walter Kaufmann

My office has been one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the state.
Jim Garrison

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
Edmund Burke

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
C. S. Lewis

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.
Herbert Spencer

Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times.
Frederica Montseny

Our enormous surplus revenues are illogical and oppressive.
John Griffin Carlisle

People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots.
Antonio Tabucchi

The ability of Americans to toss off oppressive characters is the most rewarding aspect, to me, of U.S. history.
Norman Corwin

The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.
Jonathan Miller

The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised.
John C. Calhoun

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.
Peter Ustinov