Quotes About African Slaves

#1. Southern states in the confederacy were not ready to give up their fight to secede or give up their way of life, which was made possible in large part through the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves.

Corrine Brown

#2. Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

John McWhorter

#3. [God brought African slaves to America] so that their descendants would know freedom.

Ezola B. Foster

#4. The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#5. This country of ours was built on violence;
If your ass got in the way, you was killed in silence.
And these been the ways since back in the days:
Just ask the Indians or the African slaves.

Masta Ace

#6. Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.

Madison Smartt Bell

#7. There are only some many times you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#8. Let me into the secrets you would prefer no one to know.

Pliny The Younger

#9. It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent.

Frederick Douglass

#10. Its hardness and solidity had been an odd kind of comfort. Do not wish for anything. Be and endure. The Old African had learned that enduring was power too, and just as he had been drawn to the boulder, so the slaves, after a while, were drawn to him.

Julius Lester

#11. Pen is mightier than the sword, but not so much as the eyes reading what it scripts

Ritesh Kumar

#12. They have been taught to labor," the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. "They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves.

Anonymous

#13. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

Ntozake Shange

#14. Live your life not celebrating victories, but overcoming defeats.

Che Guevara

#15. Some people are weatherwise, but most are otherwise.

Benjamin Franklin

#16. Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the "slaves" of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe - in other words, like most of the population of Europe.

Howard Zinn

#17. I am a descendent of a whole bunch of Black folk who couldn't be broken.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#18. Because of its exceptional capacity for self-criticism, the West took the initiative in abolishing slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in black Africa, where rival African tribes took black prisoners to be sold as slaves in the West.

Ibn Warraq

#19. If you can find something that you're really passionate about, whether you're a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.

Marissa Mayer

#20. White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

Colson Whitehead

#21. One of the great things about African-Americans is that we've always had this attitude: We make do with what we got. It comes from our ancestors being slaves.

Spike Lee

#22. We incarcerate more African-American men today than were slaves in 1850.

Marianne Williamson

#23. Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own.

Steven Pinker

#24. The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#25. Even when I think I'm wrong I'm right. I am all-knowing.

Rush Limbaugh

#26. No African has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the New World; whence it must be inferred, that all the blacks who are now to be found in that hemisphere are either slaves or freedmen.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#27. If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.

Nancy Horan

#28. From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country's best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

Steve Buyer

#29. There is a danger in democracy itself.

Danny Kaye