Quotes About Slavery

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

These semi-traitors [Union generals who were not hostile to slavery] must be watched. Let us be careful who become army leaders in the reorganized army at the end of this Rebellion. The man who thinks that the perpetuity of slavery is essential to the existence of the Union, is unfit to be trusted. The deadliest enemy the Union has is slavery - in fact, its only enemy.

The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.

Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery with chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.

All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.

Slavery had very little to do with the economic success of the West. Just look at the facts and figures and how much slavery actually contributed to development.

However you disguise slavery, it is slavery still. Its chains, though wreathed with roses, not only fasten on the body but rivet on the mind.

Slavery holds few men fast; the greater number hold fast their slavery.

Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the longer the tether of our slavery?

... even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!

If you didn't have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn't have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways - if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.

In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man. Brethren, your oppressors aim to do this. They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind-when they have embittered the sweet waters of the light which shines from the word of God-then, and not till then has American slavery done its perfect work.

I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.

The [Confederate] Flag is - literally - sewed division. People claim it means different things to different people, but it harkens back to the pro-slavery side of the war.

Some, while deploring animal abuses, on the same breath approve 'benefits to humans from certain animal abuses'! Who would criticize the Jewish holocaust or Black slavery, and YET praise the benefits to Germans or Whites??? This convenient ambiguity at the expense of animals is unacceptable!!!

Like Lincoln said: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.

If slavery, as a national evil, is to be abolished, and it be just that it be done at the national expense, the amount of the expense is not a paramount consideration.

Self-hate is a form of mental slavery that results in poverty, ignorance, and crime.

In careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery...To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.

Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.

When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That's not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important.

I see as white people finding loopholes in the slavery laws.

Have the daring to stop doing the things you really don't want to do. Can you see them? Look closely. Can you observe the many things you do because you reluctantly feel you should or must? Watch closely. Examine every action and reaction. Do you act naturally or do you act because you feel compelled? If you feel compelled, stop. Compulsion is slavery. Example: Refuse to go along with the crowd.

In consigning Elian back to slavery without a hearing, this administration is setting back the cause of freedom -- in this country and in Cuba.

Republicans have reached out so much to black Republicans because it's part of our tradition. Blacks have been in this nation longer than most other Americans with the possible exception of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The first blacks in Congress and the first black Governor were all Republicans. It was Republicans who fought the Civil War over slavery and who introduced the Civil Rights legislation over the next hundred years.

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.

You'll have to have the governments sell off all of their public domains; sell off their railroads, sell off their public land. You'll essentially have to introduce neo-feudalism. You'll have to roll the clock of history back a thousand years, and reduce the European population to debt slavery. It's as simple a solution as the Eurozone has imposed on Greece. And it's a solution that the leaders and the banks are urging for responsible economists to promote for the population at large.

People speaking into handheld devices while they walk down the street and saying to the device, "I'm walking down the street now." People are enslaved. I was just up in the country for a few days last week and it was great: no television, no telephone, no nothing. I walked through the woods, sat around, smoked. And it was lovely. I think the desire to be free has mutated, and we now live in an era when the slaves celebrate their slavery - this whole corporate concept of being part of a "team" at work.

Compulsory obedience to a master is a state of slavery, willing obedience to one's father is the glory of son ship.

The most racist, nastiest act by the USA, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away men, women, and children.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

... no community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

Daily I expect to be murdered or betrayed or reduced to slavery if the occasion arises. But I fear nothing, because of the promises of heaven.

It's therapy. [people] say true healing requires honest confrontation, and that can be seen on a macro scale with America and the things that have been swept under the rug, whether it be with the native Americans or slavery, or whatever holocaust that's happened on this soil.

Slavery was incredibly prosperous for some people, at that time. It was not a bad business plan, but it was terrible and inhumane. But as a business it worked.

I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery.

No people ever yet groaned under the heavy yoke of slavery, but when they deserv'd it. ...The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought. ...If therefore a people will not be free; if they have not virtue enough to maintain their liberty against a presumptuous invader, they deserve no pity, and are to be treated with contempt and ignominy.

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing states, yet no part of our slave-holding country is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants than St. Louis.

Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

What the world needs today is a definite, spiritual mobilization of the nations who believe in God against this tide of Red agnosticism. It needs a moral mobilization against the hideous ideas of the police state and human slavery. I suggest that the United Nations should be reorganized without the Communist nations in it. It is a proposal based solely upon moral, spiritual and defense foundations. It is a proposal to redeem the concept of the United Nations to the high purpose for which it was created. It is a proposal for moral and spiritual cooperation of God-fearing free nations. And in rejecting an atheistic other world, I am confident that the Almighty God will be with us.

My great and exceeding joy over these stupendous achievements, especially over the abolition of slavery (which had been the deepest desire and the great labor of my life), was slightly tinged with a feeling of sadness.

He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right.