Top 100 Quotes About Slavery
#1. So long as this country is cursed with slavery, so too will it be cursed with vampires.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#2. For humanity has moved forward to an era when wrong and slavery are being displaced, and reason and justice are being recognized as the rule of life.
Mary Livermore
#3. The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#4. People talk about history and things like slavery, genocide, and religious persecution as horrors that happened in the past because we were ignorant. But nothing's changed. We still hate what we don't understand.
J. Matthew Nespoli
#5. For sheer drama, few accounts of slavery match Solomon Northup's tale of abduction from freedom and forcible enslavement.
Ira Berlin
#6. Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#7. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#8. I do what i do for love. Anything else is a form of slavery. A reduction of my humanity. Which is why i feel the moral liberty to search through minds.
Islam Atef Aly
#9. Slavery is a condition imposed upon individuals or races not sufficiently able to protect or defend themselves, and so long as a race or people expose themselves to the danger of being weak, no one can tell when they will be reduced to slavery.
Marcus Garvey
#10. Mankind may amuse themselves with theoretic systems of liberty ... but we can only discern its true value by the practical and wretched effects of slavery.
Mercy Otis Warren
#11. For months it seemed that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely now. The working class no longer has the physical resistance for a revolution, and the Entente is too strong, and Russia is too weak.
Agnes Smedley
#12. For if there was any kindness in slavery it was dependent on the docility of the slaves; any slave who was unwilling to be a slave broke through the myth of paternalism and benevolence, and brought down on himself the violence inherent in the system. A
Wendell Berry
#13. When time and need require, we should resist with all our might, and prefer death to slavery and disgrace.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#14. The defence of human liberty against the aggressions of despotic power have been always the most efficient in States where domestic slavery was to prevail.
John C. Calhoun
#15. To live [in the church] at the beck and call of marketing logic is to live in slavery.
Mark Galli
#16. As the anti-slavery community, we must together ensure that this attention is transferred into concrete action and results.
Kailash Satyarthi
#18. Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.
Charles Dickens
#19. The hardest memory of slavery that Rialla had to bear was not the lack of freedom; it was the lack of desiring freedom.
Patricia Briggs
#20. The North understand it better - they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits - surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death.
Robert Toombs
#21. Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.
Abraham Lincoln
#23. Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it.
Gerrit Smith
#24. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln
#25. They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.
Kahlil Gibran
#26. If truth is contingent upon the society in which we live ... there is nothing intuitive or universally or absolutely true about freedom from torture or freedom from slavery; our society just happens to have come up with these values over time.
Stephen McAndrew
#27. Let us take care of our rights and we therein take care of our prosperity. Slavery is ever preceded by sleep
John Dickinson
#28. Like the pro-slavery forces who invaded Kansas, the pro-abortion forces in Washington and elsewhere want us to believe that abortion is not murder; that being born is worse than death; that the unborn baby is property, not a person.
Tim Huelskamp
#29. Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#30. The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#31. King abhorred slavery. But he struggled over how to fight it while remaining true to the religious pacifism he had inherited from his grandmother.
Martha A. Sandweiss
#32. Thus the negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his descendants; and although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#33. Whether slavery shall go into Nebraska, or other new territories, is not a matter of exclusive concern to the people who may go there. The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.
Abraham Lincoln
#34. Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.
Friedrich Hayek
#35. I would have the Constitution torn in shreds and scattered to the four winds of heaven. Let us destroy the Constitution and build on its ruins the temple of liberty. I have brothers in slavery. I have seen chains placed on their limbs and beheld them captive.
William Wells Brown
#36. The flag that was the symbol of slavery on the high seas for a long time was not the Confederate battle flag, it was sadly the Stars and Stripes.
Alan Keyes
#37. In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.
Robert E.Lee
#38. First then, it is apparent, horribly apparent, that the slavery question rides insolently over every other everywhere - in fact that is the only question which in the least affects the results of the elections.
Henry L. Benning
#39. The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#40. If a parent wants to talk about slavery or wants to talk about countries where bombs go off, they need to have a way - a setting - to have that conversation. And there are wonderful books out there for those kinds of conversations.
Jane Yolen
#41. What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
Oscar Wilde
#42. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#43. For s freedom Christ has t set us free; u stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to v a yoke of w slavery.
Anonymous
#44. Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.
Howard Zinn
#45. The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once.
Simone De Beauvoir
#47. Farming with live animals is a 7 day a week, legal form of slavery.
George Segal
#48. I am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in this District of Columbia.
Abraham Lincoln
#49. It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.
Patricia Hampl
#50. 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
#51. I Became a free woman when I decided to stop dreaming, freedom that is waiting for nothing .. and anticipation is a state of slavery - Ahlam (Chaos of the Senses)
Ahlam Mosteghanemi
#52. As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.
Tom Hodgkinson
#53. I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#54. I don't feel any 'white guilt,' because I had nothing to do with (slavery) whatsoever. I feel shame for my country that it happened and that's why I feel we need to deal with it.
Quentin Tarantino
#56. From slavery to segregation, we remember that America did not always live up to its ideals. In fact, we often fell far short of them. But we also learned that fundamental to our national character is the drive to live out the true meaning of our creed.
Bill Frist
#57. I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.
P.D. James
#58. We have the history of slavery or inequality to women, and now the civil rights movement of the 21st century is the struggle for equality for the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. And I think it's important for Americans to know about the times that we failed.
George Takei
#59. 'A living dog is better than a dead lion.' Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don't care anything about it.
Abraham Lincoln
#60. To do the work of others is slavery. To do the work of God is true liberation.
Anonymous
#61. One of the most tragic things about slavery was the mental enslavement, the way they made us believe that we were worth nothing; and that's what she's fighting against.
Jurnee Smollett
#62. Modern Slavery is not being shipped on boats; it is encouraging welfare programs and withholding information from the people that will aid them in making informed decisions.
Josephine Akhagbeme
#64. The american dream wasn't meant for me, cause lady liberty's a hypocrite she lied to me, promised me freedom,education, and equality never gave me nothing but slavery but now look at how dangerous you made me callin me a mad man because im strong and bold.
Tupac Shakur
#65. Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots, as freedom is to slavery.
Democritus
#66. According to the London-based Anti-Slavery International (ASI), the world's oldest human rights organization, there are at least 27 million people in some form of slavery around the world today. And remarkably, the U.S. contributes enormously to this sad state of the global society.
Linda Smith
#67. What has ever threatened our liberty and prosperity save and except this institution of Slavery?
Abraham Lincoln
#68. Slavery remains rife, the shackles are just different. Labels and desires have replaced the cuffs and chains.
Aisha Mirza
#70. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
Frederick Douglass
#71. It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.
Sally Mann
#72. Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.
Alfred Marshall
#73. Should I be worried about being a slave and being returned to slavery? Because certain things happened in the Constitution that had to change.
Whoopi Goldberg
#75. Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery.
Gerry Spence
#76. To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#77. America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.
Malcolm X
#78. Tyranny is the fiercest form of slavery. Terrorist is the most ferocious form of slavery. We are all slaves until every human is free from both.
James Morris Robinson
#80. Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
Gerry Spence
#81. The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.
Berenice Abbott
#82. What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression.
Roy Ayers
#83. There was no slavery in the free city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves.
George R R Martin
#84. Martin Van Buren was a shitty guy. Not just because he was a bad president, and not just because he was pro-slavery. Van Buren was shitty in a very general sort of way. And with all that that implies.
Daniel O'Brien
#85. When every one of your arguments is characterized an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters, it's a little hard to have any sort of productive debate.
Ann Coulter
#86. White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.
Steve Erickson
#87. By reserving the penalty of death for black defendants, or for the poor, or for those convicted of killing white persons, we perpetrate the ugly legacy of slavery-teaching our children that some lives are inherently less precious than others.
Joseph Lowery
#88. I have sworn eternal opposition to slavery, and by the blessing of God, I will never go back.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy
#89. The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.
Sarah Churchwell
#90. If you think your lot has been hard, read 'Up From Slavery' by Booker T. Washington, and you may see how fortunate you have been.
Napoleon Hill
#91. Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.
Frederick Douglass
#92. [T]he mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#93. The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed.
Jim Webb
#94. Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.
Germaine Greer
#95. 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
#96. The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.
Frederick Douglass
#97. Like Lincoln said: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.
David Mamet
#98. There's racism and sexism and ageism and all sorts of idiocies. But bad news is not news. We've had bad news as a species for a long time. We've had slavery and human sacrifice and the holocaust and brutalities of such measure.
Maya Angelou
#99. The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
Thomas Sowell
#100. Didn't we settle contraception & affirmative action? If the GOP keep going backwards they'll soon be debating slavery.
Andy Borowitz
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