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Slavery Quotes

Browse 2495 quotes about Slavery.

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Slavery Quotes

“Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.”

FightingMistakePovertyRichShareSlaverySlaveDefeatNeighborCowardlyEnviousObjections
Book:Nelly Sachs, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, René Sully-Prudhomme
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“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
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“On popular issues like poverty and slavery, where Christians are likely to be applauded for our social action, we are quick to stand up and speak out. Yet on controversial issues like homosexuality and abortion, where Christians are likely to be criticized for our involvement, we are content to sit down and stay quiet.”

ActionChristianSpeakSocialPovertyIssuesQuietDown AndSlaveryAbortionHomosexualityInvolvementControversialSpeaks OutSocial ActionControversial Issues
Book:Counter Culture: Following Christ in an Anti-Christian Age
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“Let us hear the dangers of thralldom to our consciences from ignorance, extreme poverty, and dependence; in short, from civil and political slavery. Let us see delineated before us the true map of man. Let us hear the dignity of his nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God-that consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest or happiness-and that God Almighty has promulgated from heaven liberty, peace, and goodwill to man!”

MenPoliticalHeavenPeaceInterestLibertyPovertyDangerIgnoranceHonorConscienceDignitySightSlaveryExtremesNobleMapsAlmightyOffensiveDependenceGoodwillBreachExtreme PovertyDerogatorySacrilegiousBreach Of Trust
Author:John Adams
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“I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader's ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow.”

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Author:Barack Obama
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“I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it's my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don't inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you.”

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Author:Barack Obama
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“According to UNESCO: there are over 154 million children in the world deprived of education due to poverty, slavery, racism, religious extremism, gender discrimination, and geographical isolation. The cost to educate a child in the third world is about $ 1 per month per child. To achieve global literacy, the investment would be $ 8 billion per year for 15 years.”

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Author:Greg Mortenson
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“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.”

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Book:A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis
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“Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice... Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”

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Author:Nelson Mandela
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“It is my vision that we all will dedicate the next decade to achieve universal literacy and education for all children, especially for girls. More than 145 million of the world's children are deprived of education due to poverty, exploitation, slavery, gender discrimination, religious extremism, and corrupt governments. May Three Cups of Tea be a catalyst to bring the gift of literacy to each of those children who deserves a chance to go to school.”

WorldMayChildrenGovernmentSchoolGirlThreeNextReligiousChanceEducationVisionPovertyMillionsAchieveDeserveUniversalSlaveryEducationalGenderDuesDecadesDiscriminationCupsTeaExploitationLiteracyDeprivedExtremismCatalystReligious ExtremismCups Of TeaEducation For AllCorrupt GovernmentGender DiscriminationThree Cups Of Tea
Author:Greg Mortenson
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“I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.”

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Book:Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)
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“The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake.”

HumansChildrenAgeReligionReligiousPovertyRightsAuthoritySlaveryHuman RightsOppressionInequalityBurningIndifferenceTortureGenocideStakesJustificationExploitationPersecutionHierarchyEnthusiasticAbandonmentNotableSmall ChildDisappearanceAcquiescenceGreat ReligiousBurning At The Stake
Author:Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
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“The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.””

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Author:Thomas Sowell
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“The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.”

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Author:Raoul Vaneigem
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“Man! The most complex of creatures, and for this reason the most dependant of creatures. On everything that has formed you, you may depend. Do not balk at this apparent slavery....a debtor to many, you pay for your advantages by the same number of dependencies. Understand that independence is a form of poverty; that many things claim you, that many also claim kinship with you.”

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Author:Andre Gide
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“Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill. The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery. Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth. It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market. Nor did this derivative bondage end when formal slavery gave way to the de-facto slavery of discrimination. To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them, because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors. It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.”

PovertyLaborSlaveryDiscriminationWelfareAfrican AmericansBlacksReparationsPoor Whites
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.”

PovertySlaverySlaveSocialismWorking ClassUtopiaGeorge OrwellClass ConsciousnessDown And Out In Paris And LondonMarcus Cato
Book:Down and Out in Paris and London
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“While I was a servant to Mr. Webster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me whenever I saw anything in the house that I thought she was in need of, to take it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket, though I had years before bought my freedom of her.”

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Book:A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison
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“Slaves in the past were captured by force; today’s slaves surrender themselves. The masters are the same old folk (who are now more civilized) who would not lift a hand against a fellow human being! They have established economic systems that perpetuate their superiority so the poor are blamed either for their laziness or their fate.”

PovertySlaverySlavePoverty QuotesSlavesSlavery QuotesInequality QuotesInequality In The WorldSlave Masters
Book:Book of Wisdom
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“Those who would give us equal opportunity for everybody are threatened by it. They are afraid to lose their privileged positions. They pay lip service to it, they act by half measures and do everything to violate the laws they have themselves instituted to make sure the high class is always high. It never changes, it always goes in a circle, when the oppressed fight and get to the top, and they become the new elite and forget the promises.”

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Book:Book of Wisdom
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“Among other possibilities, money was invented to make it possible for a foolish man to control wise men; a weak man, strong men; a child, old men; an ignorant man, knowledgeable men; and for a dwarf to control giants.”

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Book:The Use and Misuse of Children
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“Inequality and poverty, unhealth and no wealth are hand in hand. And if we are all born equal that should be true in all lands. We cannot divide the world between poor and rich countries. It's like saying the ones are good, the others are junkies. That can only increase more prejudice, miseries and sorrow. Turning the wheel today it will lead to a better tomorrow.”

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Book:The Mysterious Murder of Marilyn Monroe
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“Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.”

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Book:Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
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“Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the thousands of years in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance. Thus Europeans enslaved other Europeans, just as Asians enslaved other Asians and Africans enslaved other Africans, while Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave" derived from the word for Slavs, who were enslaved by fellow Europeans for centuries before Africans began to be brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere. Africans were not singled out by a race for ownership by Europeans, they were resorted to after the rise of nation-states with armies and navies in other parts of the world which reduced the number of places that could be raided for slaves without great costs and risks. Slave-raiding continued in Africa, primarily by Africans enslaving other Africans and then, in West Africa, selling some of their slaves to whites to take to the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the growing range of ships and the growing wealth of nations eventually made economically feasible the transportation of vast numbers of slaves from one continent to another, creating racial differences between the enslaved and their owners as a dominant pattern in the Western Hemisphere. Such a pattern was by no means limited to Europeans owning non-Europeans, however. There were many examples of the reverse, quite aside from vast regions of the earth where neither the slaves nor their owners were either black or white.”

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Author:Thomas Sowell
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“Power is given only to those you allow to have power over you. No man was born with a master. The only master of all is the Creator, and he created all men to be free. Freedom is a God-given right, not a human-granted gift. No man should have to fight to breathe in good health and peace.”

GodTruthSufferingHumanityFightingPoliticsPeaceJusticeFreedomPovertyStruggleRightsHealthHumanSlaverySlaveHuman RightsCreatorBreatheGiftOppressionManFightRightFreeWorld PeaceWillWillpowerHumaneMasterFreewillCollective PowerGgod
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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