Quotes About Slavery

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

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.

Adrian Rogers told us as often as he could he took the Bible literally. He illustrated by saying he believed the world was created in six 24-hour days. And he repeated this to make an impression upon us. In private (Jerry Vines was with us), I asked Rogers what he did with the slavery passages of the New Testament. Did he take them literally? He paused and said, 'Well, I believe slavery is a much-maligned institution. If we had slavery today, we would not have this welfare mess.'

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.

In the era of slavery, you could be a so-called Afro-Cuban one day and a so-called Black American the next day, or vice versa. I mean there was all this back and forth, and there was a lot of opposition in Black America to slavery in Cuba in particular, because slavery in Cuba lasted until the 1880s.

We call 'Slavery is wrong' a moral truth because there is a specific history of theoretical investigation of a particular kind of slavery. We discussed it for centuries in metaphysical, economic, biological, and philosophical terms; we listened to all the arguments pro and con, we read all the testimonies of slaves and witnesses, and we decided. Though this 'we" is not everybody on earth, or even most people, who've never thought about slavery much.

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.

The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.

Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of attributing . . .social pathology in today's ghettos to 'a legacy of slavery' even though black children grew up with two parents more often under slavery than today.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

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

Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States ... I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in ... abhorrence.

You can reasonably make the intellectual journey from thinking it's permissible to eat shrimp to thinking it's not permissible, or vice versa, whereas our slavery journey was uni-directional. We are as certain we are not going back to that old kind of slavery as we are that we aren't going back to the geocentric universe.

There are so many shocking things. Is it more shocking that there are children sold into slavery in every city in the world and right under our noses or that there are villages in Nepal where there are no children left because they have all been kidnapped for sex trafficking, or that there are generations of slaves in some countries where indentured slavery passes from generation to generation and that kids grow into adults not knowing that another world - another life - exists?

My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man.

But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.

Human nature is full of riddles; . . . one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?'

Human beings are not property. On the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, let us reaffirm the inherent dignity of all men, women and children. And let us redouble our efforts so that the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - 'no one shall be held in slavery or servitude' - ring true.

Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude. I am therefore utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territory, and heartily wish that every Constitutional measure may be adopted for the preservation of it.

I is a great prison. It is your slavery and bondage to the mind. The moment you enter beyond the mind, you are - but you don`t have any notion of being an ego, of being an I. In other words: the more you think you are, the less you are; the more you experience that you are not... the more you are.

This world is filled with many vulgar and dishonorable things that will claw and tear at your Christian purity if you allow them to. Don't let them! Seek instead the things of God. He will purify you and free you from your slavery to profane and inconsequential things.

Much as being active in the antislavery movement of the last century involved more than not engaging in slavery oneself, so joining in an antiviolence movement has to go beyond opting for nonviolence in one's personal life. It calls for engaging in imaginative and forceful practices of nonviolent resistance to violence, including taking a stand toward entertainment violence.

In 1855, a former American slave remarked: "Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is - tis he who has endured."I think the same holds true for women's rights. The incredulity in the question, "What rights don't women have presently that they are marching about?" reflects a troubling disconnect that comes from power and privilege.

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.

In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery

To judge by what my children are learning in school, you'd think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams, Longfellow or Fulton).

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.

When we decided to take up arms, it was because the only other choice was to surrender and to submit to 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.

Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal.

The defence of human liberty against the aggressions of despotic power have been always the most efficient in States where domestic slavery was to prevail.

The war...must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks...unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence,and that, or extermination, we WILL have.

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.

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

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.

As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values--especially the moral ones--coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world.

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.

I do not wish to be misunderstood upon this subject of slavery in this country. I suppose it may long exist, and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time. But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end.

Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity, which do not result in the exportation of bullion, increase among their subjects. They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people.

African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.

I think what is being pointed out by African-Americans is that from slavery forward they have been living in a supposed democracy which treats them as less than other citizens, less than whites in the society. And I think that pointing out that there are structures of discrimination in the society, deeply rooted racist structures, that segregate housing, that send black children to ill-equipped schools, that discriminate in the workplace - these are truths about our society that must be faced.

Life without hope, the slavery of mankind-a bondage so hopeless that slaves will no longer know they are slaves. Wealth without happiness, abundance without the power to enjoy it. The death of the spirit.

...Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.

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

The presence of the blacks is the greatest evil that threatens the United States. They increase, in the Gulf States, faster than do the whites. They cannot be kept for ever in slavery, since the tendencies of the modern world run strongly the other way. They cannot be absorbed into the white population, for the whites will not intermarry with them, not even in the North where they have been free for two generations. Once freed, they would be more dangerous than now, because they would not long submit to be debarred from political rights. A terrible struggle would ensue.

Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.

It had been happy for me if I could have lived a private life in peace and plenty, enjoying all the happiness that results from a well-tempered society founded on mutual esteem. But the injury done my country, and the chains of slavery forging for all posterity, calls me forth to defend our common rights, and repel the bold invaders of the sons of freedom.