Quotes About Slavery

Slavery, you know, is nothing else than the unwilling labor of many. Therefore to get rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish to profit by the forced labor of others and should consider it a sin and a shame. But they go and abolish the external form of slavery and arrange so that one can no longer buy and sell slaves, and they imagine and assure themselves that slavery no longer exists, and do not see or wish to see that it does, because people still want and consider it good and right to exploit the labor of others.

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.

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.

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.

Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I've heard educated white people say, 'slavery was 400 years ago.' No it very wasn't. It was 140 years ago...that's two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That's how recently you could buy a guy.

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.

Modern slavery - be it bonded labor, involuntary servitude, or sexual slavery - is a crime and cannot be tolerated in any culture, community, or country ... [It] is an affront to our values and our commitment to human rights.

It's just like a liberal, they import slaves, they hold slaves, they fight for slavery, they go to war in a civil war to defend slavery. They then install legal discrimination against blacks for a hundred years.

Those who advocate either slavery or income taxation should be ashamed of themselves. Genuine freedom entails the abolition, not the reform, of income taxation and the IRS, just as genuine freedom entailed the abolition, not the reform, of slavery.

In supporting argument for segregation, Paul [the apostol] addresses the people in his epistle to the Colossians, and he tells them how to treat their slaves. "Slaves, obey your masters. Masters, be kind to yourslaves." Paul was in favor of a kinder and gentler slavery; it never occurred to him to raise the question about whether slavery itself was immoral.

It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of slavery. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

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

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.

If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism, just as feudalism is development by refinement from slavery . Capitalism is but the gentlemen's method of slavery.

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.

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.

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.

Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say "This time you did it to yourself." I won't play that game.

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it's my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don't inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you.

If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.

The Americans say that we are ungrateful-but I ask them for heaven's sake, what should we be grateful to them for-for murdering our fathers and mothers?-Or do they wish us to return thanks to them for chaining and handcuffing us, branding us, cramming fire down our throats, or for keeping us in slavery, and beating us nearly or quite to death to make us work in ignorance and miseries, to support them and their families. They certainly think we are a gang of fools.

Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master.

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.

In truth there is only one freedom - the holy freedom of Christ, whereby He freed us from sin, from evil, from the devil. It binds us to God. All other freedoms are illusory, false, that is to say, they are all, in fact, slavery.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

Now, I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil, having due regard for its actual existence amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way, and to all the constitutional obligations which have been thrown about it; but, nevertheless, desire a policy that looks to the prevention of it as a wrong, and looks hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end.

Put anger aside. It is not a solution. Patience and love is a solution. With compassion and action, together we can end slavery.

To repress rebellion is to maintain the status quo, a condition which binds the mortal creature in a state of intellectual or physical slavery. But it is impossible to chain man merely by slaving his body; the mind also must be held, and to accomplish this, fear is the accepted weapon. The common man must fear life, fear death, fear God, fear the Devil, and fear most the overlords, the keepers of his destiny.

Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.

Animal Rights is now the greatest Social Justice issue since the abolition of slavery.

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.

Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

A toleration of slavery is, in effect, a toleration of inhumanity.

A strong belief in fate is the worst kind of slavery; on the other hand, there is a comfort in the thought that God will be moved by our prayers.

Every two, three years there is a movie about the Holocaust because they want you to remember and they want you to be reminded of what it was. When was the last time you seen a movie about slavery?

Racism in our countries is a fact in that the indian is not allowed to be a politician or aspire to being head of state. It has reached the point that 99% of the indigenous women have not gone to school. The indigenous are condemned to live in a situation designed to exterminate them. They receive a pittance of a salary, they neither speak nor write the language, politics dictates their situation. Is this slavery? I don't know what it's called. It is not the same as before because we are in modern times.

You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?

When the first people started to argue against slavery, for example, this was a new idea. If you crowd-source, you'd never come up with this. And so the - exactly the kind of progress we've made couldn't be made if we depend it on crowd-sourcing.