Kevin Bales Quotes

#1. It's as if all identity has been stolen from them, except their identity as slaves.

Kevin Bales

#2. Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor; it is the theft of an entire life.

Kevin Bales

#3. The flow of people into the United States into slavery, it follows the other types of immigration into the United States, so people who are trying to build new lives, trying to build a better life.

Kevin Bales

#4. Throughout all of human history slaves have been expensive capital purchase items. And today they're disposal inputs like styrofoam cups to an economic process.

Kevin Bales

#5. For some slaves, the first step out of bondage is to learn to see their lives with new eyes. Their reality is a social world where they have their place and some assurance of a subsistence diet. Born into slavery, they cannot easily redefine their lives outside the frame of enslavement.

Kevin Bales

#6. There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Put another way, today's slave population is greater than the population of Canada, and six times greater than the population of Israel.

Kevin Bales

#7. We're up at almost seven billion people on the planet and most of that growth has been in the developing world.

Kevin Bales

#8. We have to make it clear to the multi-nationals that slavery is too high a price to pay for cheap goods

Kevin Bales

#9. If our kids were hungry, we'd step into slavery.

Kevin Bales

#10. Most of the people who come into slavery today, the people who enter into slavery for the first time in the present moment, are not captured, they're not knocked over the head, it doesn't follow the old sorts of mechanisms.

Kevin Bales

#11. If you look at slavery across all human history, and you sort of strip away the packaging, whether it's racialized or religious-based, and you look at the actual core of the slavery, it's one person completely controlling another one.

Kevin Bales

#12. Slavery is theft - theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne.

Kevin Bales

#13. Slavery is what slavery's always been: About one person controlling another person using violence and then exploiting them economically, paying them nothing. That's what slavery's about

Kevin Bales

#14. The factor that makes people extremely vulnerable to enslavement is the lack of the rule of law.

Kevin Bales