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 creating a slave situation, you would almost never bring women. And if we look at Slavery for example, we look at the Greeks and the Romans, right? It was always men. They never brought any women. Because women carry the seeds of the revolution, right? And if you have the men by themselves, then you can do what the French did with the Blackfeet, which is breed them out.”

IfsMenLooksCan DoSituationExampleHe ManRevolutionCreatingSlaverySlaveSeedsGreek
Author:Nikki Giovanni
Create image

“No people ever yet groaned under the heavy yoke of slavery, but when they deserv'd it. ...The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought. ...If therefore a people will not be free; if they have not virtue enough to maintain their liberty against a presumptuous invader, they deserve no pity, and are to be treated with contempt and ignominy.”

PeopleIfsEnoughMightLibertyVirtueOughtTruth IsDeserveSlaveryHeavyTreatedPityContemptYokeInvadersPresumptuousIgnominy
Author:Samuel Adams
Create image

“We are a feelingless people. If we could really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering. If we could feel that one person every six seconds dies of starvation ... we would stop it. ... If we could really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in the throat, in the breast, we would go into the streets and stop the war, stop slavery, stop the prisons, stop the killing, stop destruction.”

PeopleIfsFeelsPersonsWarWould BePainSufferingDiesStreetsSixDestructionSlaveryPrisonKillingBreastsThroatSecondsStarvationThat One PersonBowels
Author:Julian Beck
Create image

“The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”

IfsGovernmentTodayPoliticalOrderOpportunityHalfEconomicCitizensProtectEqualVoteSlaveryAffairAverageCommittedGrantedDeniedPropositionsLive For TodayRight To VoteEqual OpportunityPolitical FreedomPollingConcededEconomic OrderEconomic Slavery
Book:The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Create image

“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.”

IfsNeedsMindLooksSaidTaughtHolyPaperSlaveryHearingLocalsSettlingPapersApprovedTaught UsAversionPulpitDoubters
Book:Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography
Create image

“I have watched how steadily the general feeling, as shown at elections, has been rising against Slavery. What a proud thing for England if she is the first European nation which utterly abolishes it! I was told before leaving England that after living in slave countries all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the negro character.”

IfsFirstsHas BeensCountryCharacterFeelingsWould BeNationsOpinionProudHigherEnglandElectionSlaverySlaveLeavingRisingAlteredAbolishAlterations
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)
Create image

“Only the most unapologetic biblical fundamentalists, for instance, take every biblical injunction literally. If we all took all scripture at the same level of authority, then we would be more open to slavery, to the subjugation of women, to wider use of stoning. Jesus himself spoke out frequently against divorce in the strongest of terms.”

IfsUseWould BeJesusTermLevelsAuthoritySlaveryDivorceScriptureInstanceSpokesStrongestBiblicalSubjugationUnapologetic
Author:Jon Meacham
Create image

“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.”

PeopleIfsWarSidesClassBloodPolicyDesignEuropePrejudiceEnglandSlaveryWestMissionsCriminalsSavedPursuitTreasureResistanceFollyHeroicForeign PolicyWorking ClassRulingEmancipationCrusadesInfamousPropagationFraternalSquandering
Book:Karl Marx: Selected Writings
Create image

“I would've written this story [Django] if [Barack] Obama were president or if he never existed. For one, I think it's time to tell a story that deals with this subject America has avoided for so long. Most countries have been forced to deal with the atrocities of their past that still affect them to this day. But America has been pretty slippery in the way that it has avoided looking slavery in the eye. I believe that's a problem.”

IfsThinkingWayBelieveLongHas BeensStillsCountryStoriesProblemEyeAmericaPastI BelievePresidentDealsWrittenSubjectsSlaveryBarackThis DayAvoidedAtrocitiesSlipperyDjango
Author:Quentin Tarantino
Create image

“If we want to understand the actions of a man in the early 1860's, put yourself back there in his shoes. As a young man he began piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he loved and wanted to do the rest of his life, he said. The Civil War ended traffic on the River and his job. He wrote about it in A History of A Campaign That Failed. He said: "I joined the Confederacy, served for two weeks, deserted, and the Confederacy fell." His attachment to the Southern ideal of slavery does not appear very sturdy.”

IfsMenWantDoeSaidTwoWarActionWantedJobsYoungWeekIdealsRiversSlaveryShoesCampaignsYoung ManCivil WarAttachmentSouthernTrafficTwo WeeksMississippiDesertedSturdySteamboats
Author:Hal Holbrook
Create image

“The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.”

IfsWayWellsMomentsRealizingTruth IsOrdinarySlaveryHistoricalNarrativeSurvivorHolocaustImposingAmerican SlaveryHolocaust SurvivorAmalgamationGreat Historical
Author:Chris Abani
Create image

“The Fourteenth Amendment, after the civil war, in principle brought former slaves into the category of persons, theoretically. But if you actually look, almost all the cases brought up for personal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were by corporations. Freed slaves couldn't do it. In fact they were pretty much driven back into something like slavery by a north - south compact, that allowed former slave states to criminalize black life, which made a criminal force that was basically used as a forced labor force, up until the 1930s.”

IfsLooksPersonsMadeWarStatesFactsUsedForceBlackPrinciplesCasesRightsLaborSlaverySlaveSouthDrivenCriminalsFormerCorporationsCivil WarCategoriesAmendments1930sCompactBlack LivesLabor ForcePersonal RightsFourteenth Amendment
Author:Noam Chomsky
Create image

“Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument.”

IfsDoneWholeFormOrderIndividualCausesEasyBlackCommunityPowerfulMoralPlansCenturyArgumentSlaveryInvestmentDiscriminationChecksObligationPrimariesGapsAggressiveTheoreticalCrowJim CrowReparationsMoral ObligationBlack CommunityBlack FamilyMarshall Plan
Author:Barack Obama
Create image

“I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.”

IfsWorldHas BeensI CanWarNationsHappenedInfluencePossibilitySlaverySlaveSouthCertaintyFormerCivil WarOwnersSouthernEmancipationSecessionPositive InfluenceSlave Owners
Author:David Swanson
Create image

“If you are going to abolish slavery, that opens up all these other questions: what system of labor is going to replace slave labor? What system of race relations is going to replace the race relations of slavery? Who is going to have power in the post-war South? The Emancipation Proclamation doesn't answer that question, but it throws [it] open.”

IfsWarAnswersRaceLaborRelationSlaverySlaveSouthPostsRace RelationsEmancipationAbolishProclamationPost WarEmancipation ProclamationSlave Labor
Author:Eric Foner
Create image

“My people couldn't have survived slavery without having hope that it would get better. And there's some songs from the 19th and 18th century that say [sings], "By and by, by and by, I will lay down, this heavy load." And I mean, so many songs that spoke of hope and understand it better by and by. Amazing songs. So that the slaves, just knowing that he, she, did not have the right legally to walk within one inch away from where the slave owner dictated, and yet the same person, wrote and sang with fervor, "If the lord wants somebody, here am I, send me." It's amazing.”

PeopleIfsWantMeanPersonsSongWalksLordKnowingCenturySlaveryLaysSlaveHeavyGet BetterOwnersSpokesInchesLoadSurvivedHaving Hope18th CenturyFervorSlave OwnersHeavy LoadsAmazing Song
Author:Maya Angelou
Create image

“Think of US slavery in 1850, or the subjection of women. Both of these injustices could have been - and were! - defended by pointing out, quite correctly, that this situation of slaves and women had been improving throughout the preceding century. Slaves, in particular, were worked less hard, beaten and raped less frequently, better fed, and less often ripped apart from their families. So would a celebration of moral progress have been appropriate in 1850? Surely not. Slavery could have been and should have been abolished - then, if not before.”

IfsThinkingShouldHas BeensHardSituationMoralProgressCenturyParticularShould HaveSlaverySlaveInjusticeAppropriateFedsCelebrationBeatenImprovingPointingCould Have BeenShould Have BeenRippedSubjection
Author:Thomas Pogge
Create image

“The process of creating art allows me to learn about the subject I'm illustrating. So, if I want to learn more about plantation life and slavery, I try to find clients that will give me an opportunity to work on projects that will visualize those experiences of the enslaved African and people of color. I get to learn about my roots, and my artwork allows the reader into that world by creating images that are accessible.”

PeopleIfsWorldWantGivingTryingArtOpportunityProcessSubjectsColorReaderProjectsCreatingRootsGive MeSlaveryClientsArtworkPlantationsCreating ArtIllustrating
Author:Jerry Pinkney
Create image