Quotes About Slavery

As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

Slavery is what slavery's always been: About one person controlling another person using violence and then exploiting them economically, paying them nothing. That's what slavery's about

Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

We forget the conditions - not only in slavery - but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today's incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things. We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.

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.

I mean, let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back. I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.

The greatest number of drug addicts are to be found in Teheran and in Karachi, not in the West. Not in New York believe it or not. It's the same with the roles of slavery, racism and imperialism in the world. These institutions were present in other cultures. However, it was Western civilization which did something about slavery, about racism and voluntarily dissolved its empires leaving behind a very positive legacy of institutions not to mention buildings and roadways.

Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing about slavery. You think slavery didn't exist in Africa? Even Indian tribes.

My favorite Founding Fathers, Christians like John Adams, were absolutely appalled by slavery, and did not own slaves. I think we're going to have to call on God's grace not only for slavery, but for what we're doing now with abortions.

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred-ergo, highly secure-lifelong position.

Slavery is not African history. Slavery interrupted African history.

Colonization was the idea that once slavery ended African-Americans should be encouraged - or required, in some people's view - required to leave the country. It's part of an attitude toward the abolition of slavery which says America should not be a slave society, but it can never be a multiracial society. You can never have free black and white people living together.

I think when a society has such a profoundly dark and awful evil such as slavery in its history, then it leaves scars that are very, very deep. And unless we collectively address them and really put our effort to healing them, they'll perpetuate. The United States of America are still suffering from the echoes of slavery. I think we're still reeling from all the pain that is a result of it, and that's a reality.

Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.

Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man's nature - opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

In the same way that slavery was a moral challenge for the 19th century and totalitarianism was a challenge for the 20th century, the challenge that women and girls face around the world is the moral challenge of our time.

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.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

Love brings freedom. Loyalty brings slavery.

Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to have solved the slavery problem by compensation - in fact, drew up a gradual, compensated emancipation plan as early as November, 1861 - but no slaveholders were willing to go along with it.

The story of slavery is everybody's story. It is the story about how we're all shaped by, regardless of race, regardless of how long we've been in this country. We hope that we can be a factor to both educate America around this subject but maybe more importantly help Americans finally wrestle with this, talk about it, debate it, because only through that conversation can we ever find the reconciliation healing that I think we all want.

Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.

There are realities that one needs to deal with, but very often what we are told is political reality is merely cynicism. One could equally say that slavery is a reality, and misogyny too.

If as a member of a slave nation I could deliver the suppressed classes from their slavery without freeing myself from my own, I would do so today. But it is an impossible task.

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.

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.

Life without the courage for death is slavery.

Slaveholders deployed so-called scientific racism to justify racial slavery.

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.

I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.

I don't think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion.

... 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.

Slavery is the ultimate and greatest evil. For it is based on a denial of the dignity of the human soul.

He [Stephen Douglas] is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them; that he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.

Justice needs money; it always has . . . whether for abolition of slavery and early women's rights movements or the civil rights and environmental drives of our generation.

Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.

Slavery is theft - theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne.

I think a commission set up to examine slavery and the consequences of it, would probably be a very fruitful, important dialogue for the United States to be involved in.

There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery.

They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom

How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery?

I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.

The atheist realizes that there must not only be an acceptance of his right to hold his opinion, but that ultimately his is the job to turn his culture from religion, to eliminate those irrational ideas which have held the human race in intellectual slavery.

When we see the bankruptcy, slavery, and vanity of everything else, we can finally say, ‘To die is gain.’

I know that there is still a lot of bitterness and anger, and arguably justifiably so, when you think about how brutal slavery was and what its brutal legacy still is.