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Slavery Quotes

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Slavery Quotes

“Being Christian is not just obeying orders but means being in Christ, thinking like him, acting like him, loving like him; it means letting him take possession of our life and change it, transform it, and free it from the darkness of evil and sin. ... Let us show the joy of being children of God, the freedom that living in Christ gives us which is true freedom, the freedom that saves us from the slavery of evil, of sin and of death!”

“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.”

“No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.”

“The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words.”

“Guilt is imposed by others on you. It is a strategy of the priests to exploit. It is a conspiracy between the priest and the politician to keep humanity in deep slavery forever. They create guilt in you, they create great fear of sin. They condemn you, they make you afraid, they poison your very roots with the idea of guilt. They destroy all possibilities of laughter, joy, celebration. Their condemnation is such that to laugh seems to be a sin, to be joyous means you are worldly.”

“I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.”

“By taking out a loan, I am committing myself to years of interest repayments, and therefore to years of wage slavery. And the UK has been borrowing like crazy since 1694, when the Bank of England was invented. This means that we are locked into high taxation to pay for 300 years of wars and other costly and generally disastrous state enterprises.”

“Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.”

“My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man.”

“I should like to say that I left off smoking because I considered it a mean form of slavery, to be condemned for moral as well as physical reasons; but though I see the folly of smoking clearly now, I was blind to it for some months after I had smoked my last pipe. I gave up my most delightful solace, as I regarded it, for no other reason than that the lady who was willing to fling herself away on me said that I must choose between it and her.”

“Whether happiness or unhappiness, freedom or slavery, in short whether good or evil results from an improved environment depends largely upon how the change has been brought about, upon the methods by which the physical results have been reached, and in what spirit and for what purpose the fruits of that change are used. Because a higher standard of living, a greater productiveness and a command over nature are not good in and of themselves does not mean that we cannot make good of them, that they cannot be a source of inner strength.”

“"First female president." That's it, and that's nowhere near, by the way, as powerful or penetrating as the first African-American president. I mean, women, yeah, I mean, make the case that they've been victimized. But they can't put themselves in the same shoes as slavery's legacy for example. Now, women might try to make the case. Hillary [Clinton] might try to make the case about not being ought to be able to vote, but it ain't gonna fly.”

“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.”

“Half the country seceded from the other half when Abraham Lincoln was elected because half the country couldn't abide his position on slavery. You would think 150 years later this had all become pretty historically incontestable. Yet millions continue to contest it in the face of history. Rather the denial of slavery and all its monstrous repercussions defines to one twin America what the country is and means, and therein is the DNA of those "alternative facts" that people believe when they can't stand to believe the truth.”

“We've always had the blame-America crowd. We've always had the hate-America crowd. But we've now had at least two generations of education where this has been indoctrinated into the young skulls full of mush of young people. They've heard how horrible America was back in the days of slavery. They've heard how horrible America treated women. They've heard how horrible every minority group was treated. They've heard how mean-spirited the founders were. They've heard all kinds of literal lies.”

“We have landowners, small growers. We have people who are holding onto land that was acquired by their families after slavery. They need to produce some of the food we eat, so they can pay the taxes and hold onto the property. Taxes keep going up. We, and by we I mean black people, are rapidly becoming a landless people. Our ancestors, coming out of slavery, acquired more than 15 million acres of land. Today, we're probably down to less than 2 million acres.”

“There are some really great books that have been written about slavery, but I don't think that the discourse about it in society has been very accurate or healthy. I don't think we've come up with ways to tell it that don't insult people or hit them in the wrong way. Part of the problem is that most people don't really understand what slavery was anyway. Most white people didn't own slaves. Slavery was a way of life, just like driving cars is a way of life now. It doesn't mean that it was right.”

“It's a shameful piece of history and I think - I don't mean to be political or sobering or anything - but I think America, the United States, we still have to deal with the issue of our original sin, which was slavery. And I think we're seeing the ramifications, the consequences, of not really facing the truth as to what we as a nation struggled towards. You know, struggled with and are still struggling and rectifying.”

“Why wouldn't somebody have the same legal rights as everybody else in our society? What is that about? I don't even understand them putting same sex marriage on the ballot. So if fifty-one percent of the people say it shouldn't happen, it's not going to happen? You can get fifty-one percent of the people to say just about anything - to say let's bring back slavery, or all Mexicans should be slaves, or something absolutely crazy like that. Does that mean we do it?”

“Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.”

“If as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means, succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future; and this too, so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation.”

“I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that 'while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress.' If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”

“American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity and in defiance of those of their own country. The same just and benevolent motives which produced interdiction in force against this criminal conduct will doubtless be felt by Congress in devising further means of suppressing the evil.”

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

“I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.”

“As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.”

“While we see the Course of the final abolition of human Slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who Chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a Single day.”

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.”

“The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism. It doubtless satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery-even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness-is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.”