Best slavery & class Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The very mudsills of society. We call them slaves. But I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere, it is eternal.”

Term Class Eternal Slavery Slave

Author:James Henry Hammond

“Nobody is fit to rule anybody else. It is not alleged that Mankind is perfect, or that merely through his/her natural goodness (or lack of same) he/she should (or should not) be permitted to rule. Rule as such causes abuse. There are no superpeople nor privileged classes who are above 'imperfect Mankind' and are capable or entitled to rule the rest of us. Submission to slavery means surrender of life.”

Should Mean Causes Natural Perfect Class Mankind Fit Goodness Capable Abuse Slavery Surrender Imperfect Entitled Privileged Submission Perfect Man Very Mean

Author:Albert Meltzer

“If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable - and this is why we are the enemies of the State.”

Ifs States Results Enemy Class Slavery Domination Unthinkable

Author:Mikhail Bakunin

“Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

World Needs Made Wisdom Politics Community Class Economy Modern Morality Limits Slavery Slave Technique Made It Liberalism Leisure Privileged Modern World Prerogative

Book:In Praise of Idleness

Source: In Praise of Idleness

“To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.”

Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: Together with A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

“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.”

Ifs Today Nations My Own Class Impossible Members Tasks India Slavery Slave

Book:Freedom's Battle: Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation

Source: Freedom's Battle: Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation

“The Aristocratic Institutions of England [had] acted much like the Slavery Institutions of America... [in] demoralis[ing] large classes outside their own special boundaries... [in producing] a long habit of submission... [and in] enfeebl[ing] by corrupting those who should assail them.”

Should Long America Class Special Habit England Institutions Slavery Boundaries Submission Aristocratic

Author:John Bright

“If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Source: Karl Marx: Selected Writings

“They don't really focus on that history here in America. I remember growing up as a kid, history class was very washed-over. They didn't really get into the gritty bits of slavery. It's a very, very small section in the history books. It's not something they really touch on directly with American curriculums.”

Book Kids America Remember Bits Class Growing Up Focus Growing Slavery Sections Curriculum History Books History Class

Author:Aldis Hodge

“When you think about the abolition of slavery for example, for the ruling class with the rich white people owning plantations and states, and things like that, slavery was to their benefit. To oppose it didn't make any sense at all on a rational basis. But on a rights basis, on a principle basis, it made obvious, overwhelming sense.”

People Thinking Made States White Class Principles Rich Rights Example Benefits Bases Slavery Obvious Rational Overwhelming Ruling Abolition Plantations Abolition Of Slavery

Author:Edward Snowden

“And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

Men Trying Humans Long War God Stories Religion Christianity Class Poverty Terrible Ambition Slavery Mere Empires Hopeless Human History Prostitution

Book:A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

Source: A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

“The slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters, as you are the master of your own negroes.”

Courses Class Masters Slavery Slave Traders Breeders

Book:Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln(1832-1865) (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition)

Source: Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln(1832-1865) (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition)

“Now I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil.”

Country Political Evil Social Moral Class Slavery Belonging Contemplating

Book:The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Source: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“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.”

Source: The Complete Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

“In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.”

“The land on which they (the Founding Fathers) formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we’ve torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it’s ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.”

Stills Moments Hands Lying Father Belief Nations Class Land Citizens Built Slavery Unions Liberation Genocide Imperfect Fabric Torn Founding Imperialism Stolen

Author:Melissa Harris-Perry

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.”

World Names Known Moral Class Effects Band Perception Slavery Aristocracy Conceded Slaveholders

Book:A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree. The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.”

Law Race Class Slavery Division African Americans Blacks Race Relations Laws Whites

Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Source: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form--which is why in 1705 Virginia's legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.”

Class Labor Slavery African Americans Blacks Whites White Privilege Slaves Slave Owners

Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Source: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“I knew the houses were to be searched; and I expected it would be done by country bullies and the poor whites. I expected I knew nothing annoyed them so much as to see colored people living in comfort and respectability; so I made arrangements for them with especial care.... It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation.”

Race Class Slavery African Americans Blacks Race Relations Slaves

Book:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Source: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy and find what they dread most.”

Class Revolution Slavery Abolition

Author:Wendell Phillips

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