Quote by Steve Biko: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

When people who are oppressed begin to believe that they deserve their situation, or that they are inferior, they become their own jailers. External chains are less powerful than internal ones. Liberation begins not with laws or elections but with people refusing to accept a diminished image of themselves.

This statement appears in I Write What I Like, a collection of Biko's writings published in 1978, a year after his death in police custody. South Africa was in the grip of intensified apartheid repression following the 1976 Soweto uprising, and the Black Consciousness Movement was a target of state violence.

South African anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, which argued that psychological liberation was as important as political freedom. He was killed by South African security police in 1977 while in custody, and his writings were published posthumously as I Write What I Like.