Born Into Slavery Quotes

#1. 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

#2. What will our children be like ? A lot depends on us. But it's up to them as well. What must be alive in them is a striving for freedom. That depends on us. People who have been born into slavery find it hard to lose the habit.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#3. You ever think about the noose?'

'I been thinking about the noose since I was born.

Stacey Lee

#4. I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity absolutely disgusting.

Victor Gollancz

#5. I endorse without reserve the much-abused sentiment of Gov. M'Duffie, that "slavery is the corner stone of our Republican edifice;" while I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that "all men are born equal.

James Henry Hammond

#6. Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome's ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens.

Anthony Everitt

#7. That was when I realized we weren't born to be
slaves. It was ignorant for any man to think he could be the master of another. We were all meant to be free, and somewhere there were good people helping to heal this broken world.

Jay Grewal

#8. Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America.

Herman Cain

#9. That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

George Mason

#10. Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

Franz Kafka

#11. The man born and bred a slave, even if freed, never loses wholly the feeling or manner of a slave.

Mary C. Ames

#12. The creation of the spiritual was no accident. It was a creation born of necessity, so that the slave might more adequately adjust himself to the conditions of the New World.

Benjamin E. Mays

#13. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

Andy Warhol

#14. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#15. When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

#16. When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

Herman Melville

#17. The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?)

Tina Packer

#18. He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.

Steven Erikson