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Slavery Quotes

Browse 2495 quotes about Slavery.

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Slavery Quotes

“We are a free people; and now you have planted in our country the title deeds of our future slavery. You are neither god nor demon; who are you, then, to make slaves? Orou! You understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have written on this sheet of metal: This country is ours. This country yours? And why? Because you have walked thereon? If a Tahitian landed one day on your shores, and scratched on one of your rocks or on the bark of your trees: This country belongs to the people of Tahiti - what would you think?”

PeopleIfsThinkingMenCountryLanguageWrittenTreeAtheismRocksOne DaySlaverySlaveDeedsPositive AtheismOur CountryTitlesDemonShoreOur FutureMetalsSheetsBarkTahiti
Author:Denis Diderot
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“To give liberty to a slave before he understands its value is, perhaps, rather to impose a penalty than to bestow a blessing.”

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Book:Views of society and manners in America: in a series of letters from that country to a friend in England, during the years 1818, 1819, and 1820
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“Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men havethe same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.”

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Author:Angelina Grimke
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“... 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.”

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Author:Joycelyn Elders
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“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.”

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

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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
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“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?”

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Author:Dorothy Day
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“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.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
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“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.”

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Book:Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker
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“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.”

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Author:Nikki Giovanni
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“A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage for holding the slave.”

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Book:Glorious Thoughts of Gandhi: Being a Treasury of about Ten Thousand Valuable and Inspiring Thougths of Mahatma Gandhi, Classified Under Four Hundred Subjects
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“Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government.”

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Book:A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it in the State of Virginia
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“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.”

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Book:The Writings of George Washington: Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private
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“Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people... There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view... That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to concerned.”

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Author:Jesse Jackson
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“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.”

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Book:Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)
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