Quotessence
Home / Topics / Slavery Quotes

Slavery Quotes

Browse 2495 quotes about Slavery.

Related topics

SlaveMenPeopleIfsWarThinkingStatesHumansLibertyWorldBlackCivil WarMayShouldCountryWayChildrenAmericaFormKnowsLongHas BeensMastersBe A SlaveGovernmentMadeFreedomNationsPoliticalLawMeanStillsWhiteAbolitionRightsEvilWantInstitutionsKindLaborMoralYearsBelieveRaceTodayDoeGivingJusticeLooksMindFactsFirstsTwoAfrican AmericanFightingModernWholeEndsHandsSouthFeelsIdeasIndividualRacismSocialUnitedAbolition Of SlaveryConstitutionNeedsPersonsPrinciplesSelfChainsPropertyCausesCulturePovertyWishAnimalCenturyNamesUnionsWellsAmerican SlaveryBondageConditionsDesireDifferentIgnoranceIssuesOppressionSinBookDoneHumanityMightReasonRepublicanSegregationTogethermore

Slavery Quotes

“... if you're poor and ignorant, with a child, you're a slave. Meaning that you're never going to get out of it. These women are in bondage to a kind of slavery that the 13th Amendment just didn't deal with. The old master provided food, clothing and health care to the slaves because he wanted them to get up and go to work in the morning. And so on welfare: you get food, clothing and shelter--you get survival, but you can't really do anything else. You can't control your life.”

IfsKindChildrenCareWantedPoorDealsMorningMastersSurvivalSlaverySlaveIgnorantGet UpHealth CareWelfareClothingsAmendmentsShelterBondage
Author:Joycelyn Elders
Create image

“... some of my people could have been left [in Africa] and are living there. And I can't understand them and they don't know me and I don't know them because all we had was taken away from us. And I became kind of angry; I felt the anger of why this had to happen to us. We were so stripped and robbed of our background, we wind up with nothing.”

PeopleKnowsKindHas BeensI CanHappensLeftFeltTakenWindSlaveryAngryBackgroundsOppressionKnow MeCould Have Been
Author:Fannie Lou Hamer
Create image

“When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.”

MenYearsWarCountryWhiteFourFieldsWillingPaidSlaverySlaveSouthCivil WarKitchenFour YearsBloodyWhite ManBondageWrathCornAnother ManOffspringRetributionPenance
Book:Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth: Also Addresses Before Georgia Legislature Woman's Clubs, Women's Organizations and Other Noted Occasions
Create image

“It was a marvel, an enigma in abolition latitudes, that the slaves did not rise en-masse, at the beginning of hostilities.”

WarSlaveryRoseSlaveCivil WarHostilityAbolitionEnigmaLatitude
Book:Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth: Also Addresses Before Georgia Legislature Woman's Clubs, Women's Organizations and Other Noted Occasions
Create image

“We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community.”

KnowsMenRealSometimesFormChoicesBeliefWomenBlackCommunityWhitePracticeDoubtPossibilitySonRacismDaughterMen And WomenSlaveryForgivingLoyaltyConfusionDividedWhite ManBlack WomenOur CommunityOur DaughterDubious
Book:Saving Our Sons
Create image

“I think that hip-hop should be spelled with a capital "H," and as one word. It's the name of our black people culture, and it's the name of our identity and consciousness. I think hip-hop is not a product, but a culture. I think rap is a product, but when hip-hop becomes a product, that's slavery, because you're talking about people's souls. To me, that's the biggest problem.”

PeopleThinkingShouldSoulProblemCultureNamesBlackConsciousnessTalkingIdentityProductsSlaveryHip HopRapHipsHopsBlack PeopleOne Word
Author:KRS-One
Create image

“Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?”

GivingTryingMindFirstsChildrenDoneOrderEvilSocialSickSlaverySlaveSaintMinistersAvoidingNobilitySocial OrderLeper
Author:Dorothy Day
Create image

“As the feudal system retained many of the elements of slavery, modified by the traditions, customs, and practices of the primitive communities, so capitalism retained the essential usurpations of feudalism, though professing to guard personal freedom, and to observe equity between the owner and the occupier of the land, the employer and the employed.”

CommunityPracticeLandEssentialsElementsCapitalismTraditionSlaveryOwnersCustomsPrimitiveEmployedEquityEmployersPersonal FreedomFeudalismUsurpationFeudal System
Author:Joshua K. Ingalls
Create image

“If there be any man who thinks the ruin of a race of men a small matter, compared with the last decoration and completions of hisown comfort,--who would not so much as part with his ice- cream, to save them from rapine and manacles, I think I must not hesitate to satisfy that man that also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper by placing the negro nation on a fair footing than by robbing them.”

IfsThinkingMenMatterLastsNationsRaceComfortFairsSlaveryIceRuinsCreamIce CreamCheaperCompletionDecorationRobbingVanilla
Book:The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Create image

“Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is not slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master.”

GivingFeelsReligiousConditionsHumilityMastersSlaverySlaveSentimentsSuperiorityTriflesFadingElevation
Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
Create image

“To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.”

PeopleSpiritLyingConsciousnessStreetsColdDrinkHolySpeechConscienceRaisesTablesSlaveryServantHoly SpiritHypocrisyTailsSevereChampagneRacketDineSerfs
Author:Anton Chekhov
Create image

“The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians.”

ChristianNamesVirtueBearsFemaleMercyAbuseSlaverySlaveLustAfrican AmericanTyrantsBrutalIrresponsibleAfrican American Women
Book:Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker
Create image

“One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them.”

IfsUseHandsReligiousInterestingDutyAdvantageCrisisSlaveryPrivilegeUsefulness
Book:Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker
Create image

“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him agesof education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”

IfsHeartChildrenHas BeensMadePurposeReadingBornBehindsChristianityCrimeCivilizationShadowInstitutionsSlaveryBillsPrivilegeEnvySecureMade ItPassagesInheritanceDominionLegislators
Author:Frances Harper
Create image

“It is said that the Negro is ignorant. But why is he ignorant? It comes with ill grace from a man who has put out my eyes to makea parade of my blindness,--to reproach me for my poverty when he has wronged me of my money.... If he is poor, what has become of the money he has been earning for the last two hundred and fifty years? Years ago it was said cotton fights and cotton conquers for American slavery. The Negro helped build up that great cotton power in the South, and in the North his sigh was in the whir of its machinery, and his blood and tears upon the warp and woof of its manufactures.”

IfsMenYearsHas BeensSaidTwoEyeLastsFightingPoorPovertyGraceBloodTearsRacismHundredYears AgoSlaverySouthIllIgnorantConquerFiftyEarningBlindnessSighMachineryParadesCottonReproachWrongedWarpAmerican Slavery
Author:Frances Harper
Create image

“For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were.”

MenYearsMadeRealSoulCharacterLightValuesHoursMemoriesSinVisionPrinciplesHeardHabitMarkSlaveryCaughtInterviewsSpokesRoutineDestroyingWiserSublimeCaught UpPenniesDoubtedDreary
Book:Essays and Lectures
Create image