Top 81 Slavery History Quotes
#1. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.
Ntozake Shange
#2. Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'
Maya Angelou
#3. Slavery all day,
and then, suddenly, by nightfall- freedom!
Margarita Engle
#4. It struck Linda suddenly that this was the middle of the night. Even here, in the city that never slept, most people now were sleeping. Law firm time was like casino time, only instead of an endless cocktail hour it was always a neon-bright afternoon. The dead center of the workday, all night long.
Tara Conklin
#5. I went back and researched the history of gospel; where it came from, slavery times, communicating with each other without their master knowing what they are saying, and that gospel artists view themselves differently.
Boris Kodjoe
#6. What if history was changed? slavery reversed
Would black ladies see white boys and clinch they purse?
Fredro Starr
#7. < ... > black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call "America." This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.
David Brion Davis
#8. 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
#9. Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation's involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.
Douglas Wilder
#10. The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.
John Henrik Clarke
#11. The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#12. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#13. History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
#14. But when they brought Sabira out, the crowd parted almost magically. A sea of hands rose faster than a swell and a bidding war commenced, amongst these civilized gentlemen who made their living off the backs of slaves.
Jay Grewal
#16. Up until now, women have depended completely upon men for their survival. You're dealing with thousands of years of history, where sexual slavery was the condition. While suddenly the laws may change, to some extent, the conditioning doesn't go away that fast.
Frederick Lenz
#17. Slavery is something that affects all of us. It's all of our history.
John Ridley
#18. The world will never know you because you have not become a slave of your gift
Sunday Adelaja
#19. In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#20. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C.S. Lewis
#21. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
Carl Bernstein
#22. Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark ... In the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#23. I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#24. In history, the bleeding
from arbitrary beatings, forced
breedings, and choked-heat
breathing could almost be withstood
by soul-feeding songs sung,
or listlessly hummed
just to go on.
Kristen Henderson
#25. Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.
Bryan Stevenson
#26. 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
#27. A hostage?"
"They used the word slave, but isnt' it the same thing? Isn't that what you'd call it if someone stole me and put me in a house and wouldn't let me leave? Isn't it?
Tiffany Reisz
#28. The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.
W.G. Sebald
#29. 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
#30. It states, History should be regarded as a means for understanding the past and solving the challenges of the future. It also suggests that this celebration of the end of slavery is an important and enriching part of the history and heritage of the United States.
Mark Foley
#31. If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.
Steve Erickson
#32. In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. How can we trust a religion that has advocated slavery and the subjugation of women throughout history?
Perry Marshall
#40. For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the "mudsill" class necessary to support every society.
David Brion Davis
#41. Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.
Hari Kunzru
#42. The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.
Bernie Sanders
#43. Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.
Henry Louis Gates
#44. Reading gives us the furniture of our minds. Reading can spell the difference between independence and slavery; liberation and isolation. Without reading, our history would have turned out differently. Reading made and shaped our heroes. Reading liberates.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#45. A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.
Glen Chambers
#46. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad on how black people have been brainwashed.How they've been taught to love white and hate black, how we've been robbed of our names in slavery.We were robbed of our culture, we were robbed of our true history. So it left us a walking dead man.
Muhammad Ali
#47. In history, she wasn't there while we reenacted the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, and Mr. Lee tried to make me argue the Pro-Slavery side, most likely as punishment for some future "liberally minded" paper I was bound to write.
Kami Garcia
#48. While the framers of the United States Constitution were ashamed of slavery and used euphemisms in place of the term "slave", the authors of the Confederate Constitution proudly used the term no less than ten times.
C.L. Gammon
#49. In 1891 the Brazilian Minister of Finance decreed the abolition of history; he ordered the destruction of every document which dealt in any way with slavery or the slave trade; a nation-wide burning of the books.
Manu Herbstein
#50. Slavery is not African history. Slavery interrupted African history.
Mutabaruka
#51. Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
Colson Whitehead
#52. I think slavery was an awful, awful period in our history, but when I look at what's become of black culture since emancipation, I think you have to admit, maybe the Confederacy was on to something
Zach Braff
#53. There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.
Robert M. T. Hunter
#54. I look at history, there's not a government on the planet I respect. No country in history was ever safe to its women; internet sex is $100 billion a year industry, and 15-20 million men a day have sex with a child in sexual slavery.
Patch Adams
#55. There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quests for profits comes into sharp conflict with people's demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled. Pg. 10
Walter Rodney
#56. Mistakes from our collective past are like any other: they require intervention--a remedy--to correct. They don't erase themselves over time.
Jonathan R. Miller
#57. Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.
Joy DeGruy
#58. In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.
Megan Smolenyak
#59. In the pioneer West Whitopias, immigration tended to be the dominant social and racial issue. In Forsyth County, Georgia, immigration is still an issue, but because you have that complicated history of the Trail of Tears and slavery and Jim Crow, the Whitopia has a different flavor.
Richard Benjamin
#60. With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.
Andrew Roberts
#61. Very few tyrants argued for the slavery of the masses. Instead, they argued for their right to protect the people from themselves.
A.E. Samaan
#62. , imagine a loamy earth that starts with genocide, then adds a mix of further disease, wars, hurricanes, murder, great fires, dueling, insurrection and slavery, just to name a few of the many instances of tragedy. What dark seed would take root in such a disturbed and twisted soil?
James Caskey
#63. < ... > tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.
David Brion Davis
#64. On this International Day for the Abolition of Slavery let us reaffirm the inherent dignity of all men, women and children. And let us redouble our efforts to build societies in which slavery truly is a term for the history books.
Ban Ki-moon
#65. Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.
Terry Eagleton
#66. Miss Taggart," he said, with an odd note of sternness in his voice, "just remember that he represented a code of existence which - for a brief span in all human history - drove slavery out of the civilized world. Remember it, when you feel baffled by the nature of his enemies.
Ayn Rand
#67. Slavery isn't Black history," I point out. "It's everyone's history." A
Jodi Picoult
#68. How a member of the church - one who had read the Good Lord's bible - could sit so calmly and watch a man be led to his destruction frightened me.
Jay Grewal
#69. For most of human history people owned other people. Then, only a hundred and fifty years ago, our ancestors figured out that was a bad idea. One day we'll figure out, or our descendants will figure out, that people owning land they don't live on or work is a bad idea too.
Dennis Vickers
#70. Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxims, Laissez-faire and 'Pas trop gouverner' are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least.
George Fitzhugh
#71. I hate it when they tell us how far we've came to be; as if our people's history started with slavery.
Immortal Technique
#72. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#73. Thus the word "inhuman", in this book's title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings.
David Brion Davis
#74. When slavery is established in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.
Edmund Burke
#75. < ... > this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.
David Brion Davis
#76. Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.
Maya Angelou
#77. The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism - the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#78. 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
#79. But really, for me, I tried to find first-person accounts. I tried to read stories from men and women who had survived slavery because it's different when you hear it from their mouths instead of reading it from a history book.
Jurnee Smollett
#80. Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.
Edward Gibbon
#81. In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians.
Karl Marx
