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Slavery Quotes

Browse 2495 quotes about Slavery.

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Slavery Quotes

“Yes, twenty-seven million in slavery is a lot of people, but it is just .0043 percent of the world's population. Yes, $23 billion a year in slave-made products as services is a lot of money but it is exactly what Americans spent on Valentine's Day in 2005. If humans trafficking generates $32 billion in profits annually, that is still a tiny drop in the ocean of the world economy.”

PeopleIfsWorldYearsHumansMadeStillsMillionsEconomyProductsOceanPercentTwentiesSlaverySlaveSevenPopulationProfitBillionsTinyLots Of MoneyValentineValentine's DayTraffickingWorld EconomyDrops In The Ocean
Author:Kevin Bales
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“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.”

MenJusticeSlaverySelfishnessHis Love
Book:Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 1: 1832-1858: Library of America #45
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“In [India] and across the globe, hundreds and thousands of children, as young as three, as young as four, are sold into sexual slavery. But that's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for. They are sold in the name of adoption. They are sold in the name of organ trade. They are sold in the name of forced labor, camel jockeying, anything, everything.”

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Author:Sunitha Krishnan
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“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.'”

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Author:Adrian Rogers
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“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.”

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Author:Nawal El Saadawi
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“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.”

PeopleMenMeanImportantTodayAmericaBlackRaceClassCitizensMassFunctionSlaverySlaveCriminalsDefinedPrimariesSignificanceMeant To BeBlack PeopleParallelsCrowBlacknessCastesIncarcerationJim CrowRace In AmericaCaste SystemMass IncarcerationSecond Class Citizens
Author:Michelle Alexander
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“Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.”

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Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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“Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.”

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Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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“Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.'”

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Book:Mistress of herself: speeches and letters of Ernestine L. Rose, early women's rights leader
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“I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.”

FeelingsAmericaCoursesRaceMoralClassBoysAliveChildhoodRiversMarkRelationOriginalsSlaveryWinterDelightFinishedInnocenceNarrativeThemeHypocrisyLocksElegantStarksStay TrueAmazementUnforgivingVernacular
Author:David Oshinsky
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“A [desire] to abolish slavery prevails in North America, many of the Pennsylvanians have set their slaves at liberty, and [Virginia legislators] have petitioned the King for permission to make a law for preventing the importation of more [slaves] into that colony. This request, however, will probably not be granted, as their former laws of that kind have always been repealed.”

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Author:Benjamin Franklin
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“Slavery was, in a very real sense, the first international human rights issue to come to the fore. It led to the adoption of the first human rights laws and to the creation of the first human rights non-governmenta l organization. And yet despite the efforts of the international community to combat this abhorrent practice, it is still widely prevalent in all its insidious forms, old and new.”

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Author:Kofi Annan
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“I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognizes the principle of slavery.”

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Book:Slave Narratives Compilation: Twelve Years A Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave
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“Although it has been fashionable to deny it, anti-slavery doctrines began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and were accompanied by the eventual disappearance of slavery in all but the fringes of Christian Europe. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World, they did so over strenuous papal opposition, a fact that was conveniently 'lost' from history until recently. Finally, the abolition of New World slavery was initiated and achieved by Christian activists.”

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Author:Rodney Stark
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“We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.”

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Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Where there is a man who does not labor because another is compelled to work for him, there slavery is.”

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Book:Church and State and Other Essays: Including Money; Man and Woman: Their Respective Functions; The Mother; A Second Supplement to the Kreutzer Sonata
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“We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.-Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them, if we basely entail hereditary bondage upon them.”

IfsHumanityJusticeLibertyGenerationsHonorCostSucceedSlaveryGuiltEndureSurrenderInnocentAncestorContestsBondagePosterityHereditaryWretchednessInfamyGallantResigning
Book:Jefferson Himself: The Personal Narrative of a Many-Sided American
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