Top 100 Slavery's Quotes
#1. If through your vices you afflicted are, Lay not the blame of your distress on God; You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards, So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.
Solon
#2. There are a substantial number of actual victims - of slavery's aftermath, gay bashing, criminal assault, sexual discrimination, physical abuse - whose genuine grievances are trivialized by victim chic. That is the real tragedy. Van
Ken Wilber
#3. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#4. My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom.
Maya Angelou
#5. You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.
Paul Mooney
#6. But the thing is, slavery's not a new invention. And solitary confinement - did you know, in America we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells?
Emma Donoghue
#7. Must I dwell in slavery's night And all pleasure take its flight Far beyond my feeble sight, Forever?
Juana Ines De La Cruz
#8. You actually abolish slavery by accompanying the slave. We don't strategize our way out of slavery, we solidarize, if you will, our way toward its demise. We stand in solidarity with the slave, and by doing so, we diminish slavery's ability to stand.
Gregory Boyle
#9. 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
#10. What good's a black face if it means I'm just someone else's property? Why give me these arms and legs just to carry someone else's load, not my own?
Stacey Lee
#11. Imagine yourself in Harriet Tubman's shoes. Fighting to be freed from deplorable conditions. Placing one foot in front of the other, putting slavery behind you. If a petite, abused slave can rise up, fight for freedom, secure the freedom of others, and change her world, so can I. And so can you.
Susie Larson
#12. The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
Henry Adams
#13. Most people were raised to think they are not worthy. School is a process of taking beautiful kids who are filled with life and beating them into happy slavery. That's as true of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year executive as it is for the poorest.
Bill Talcott - Organizer
Studs Terkel
#14. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
Herman Melville
#15. Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of attributing ... social pathology in today's ghettos to 'a legacy of slavery' even though black children grew up with two parents more often under slavery than today.
Thomas Sowell
#16. Notwithstanding all the wrongs that slavery heaped upon me, I can bless it for one thing-youth's important lesson of self-reliance.
Elizabeth Keckley
#17. We're not mindless golems, designed to think exactly the same thing. To try to suppress those thoughts is no better than slavery, and being free to say what you want, write what you want or draw what you want, as long as it doesn't offend anyone... That's no freedom at all.
T.J. Dixon
#18. For two hundred years Haiti has been swimming upstream. We were the first country in which independence was won by a group of slaves - black slaves. Across the water, the country that had just achieved independence - the U.S. - still practiced slavery.
Michele Montas
#19. My message is, is that although some of you didn't agree with the actions we took, now let's work together to rebuild Iraq, rebuild Afghanistan, fight AIDS and hunger, deal with slavery, like sex slavery, and deal with proliferation. Let's work together on big issues.
George W. Bush
#20. Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.
Horace Mann
#21. There's no dishonor in being forced by a superior power into slavery, but it is an eternal disgrace to voluntarily surrender one's liberty for a filthy bowl of oatmeal and promise of security by liars.
Charley Reese
#22. How he loathed his life-long slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse. "It's the clock that is the nay-sayer to life," he thought
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#23. Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
W. H. Auden
#24. How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.
Edmund S. Morgan
#25. 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
#26. You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.
Stefan Molyneux
#27. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days.
Kate Chopin
#28. Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.
Nina Simone
#29. Achi used to say that, for a woman, sex was her greatest strength. Morality was nothing but a chain invented by man to enslave women.
Anand Neelakantan
#30. There was a uniqueness to the American case of slavery. 10 million people, a conservative estimate, were brought to America ... hundreds of people were set up in work camps, and hereditary-forced labor was put in place. That's a very different thing than the personal slavery that existed elsewhere.
Edward Ball
#31. 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
#32. Our touchstones of slavery are 'Song of the South,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'The Birth of a Nation.' It's hard to separate the cinematic quality from the underlying themes. I appreciate the films, but the message was repugnant.
John Ridley
#33. It is bad religion to deify doctrines and creeds ... Doctrines, let's not forget, supported slavery and apartheid ... Moreover, doctrines can divide while compassion can only unite.
William Sloane Coffin
#34. Freedom is slavery some poets tell us.
Enslave yourself to the right leader's truth,
Christ's or Karl Marx', and it will set you free.
Robert Frost
#35. In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man.
Henry Highland Garnet
#36. I sit here before you trying to figure out how to pay a tax debt? If that's not like enough to slavery, I don't know.
Lauryn Hill
#37. I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican.
Marion Barry
#38. Human trafficking is the illegal trade of human beings, mainly for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. In short, it's modern day slavery.
Jen Lilley
#39. Thompson's message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in "strangers," how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil?
Mark A. Noll
#40. In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It's time we did the same for homophobia.
William Sloane Coffin
#41. The masters and overseers were so good at employee development, in their absence, the employees still achieved the company's mission
Darnell Lamont Walker
#42. My interest in India's freedom will cease if she adopts violent means, for their fruit will not be freedom but slavery in disguise.
Mahatma Gandhi
#43. 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
#44. For centuries the Bible's emphasis on compassion and love for our neighbor has inspired institutional and governmental expressions of benevolent outreach such as private charity, the establishment of schools and hospitals, and the abolition of slavery.
Ronald Reagan
#45. Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that's a fact.
E.W. Jackson
#46. In 1788 Dr. Rush had told the clergy that, whatever their doctrinal differences, "you are all united in inculcating the necessity of morals," and "from the success or failure of your exertions in the cause of virtue, we anticipate the freedom or slavery of our country.
Gordon S. Wood
#47. We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let's take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.
Muhammad Yunus
#49. But no sooner had morning broken than he took hold of his whip and ceremoniously stepped out to address his slaves. Each blow was liberating, it was like unshaking proof of the great lie of God's existence.
Juhani Peltonen
#50. As black people, we want our story to be this constant ascendance from slavery. But it's not like that. You push and it goes up. Then there's a backlash, and if folks stop pushing, it goes down. Let's face it, it's a lot more complicated.
Stanley Nelson Jr.
#51. [S]ex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women's issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender, or creed.
Nicholas D. Kristof And Sheryl WuDunn
#52. Although we have, in theory, abolished human slavery, recognized women's rights, and stopped child labor, we continue to enslave other species who, if we simply pay attention, show quite clearly that they experience parental love, pain, and the desire for freedom, just as we do.
Ingrid Newkirk
#53. I think, in many people's minds, the Confederate battle flag is not only a memorial to our ancestors, which is perfectly OK, but also a symbol of white superiority and an inclination for people to believe that even slavery would've been OK.
Jimmy Carter
#54. 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
#55. There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever. There will be reckoning yet ... it may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just
Solomon Northup
#56. Compulsory obedience to a master is a state of slavery, willing obedience to one's father is the glory of son ship.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.
Nenia Campbell
#58. There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence.
Mark Shields
#59. The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.
Randall Robinson
#61. Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
Tom Hodgkinson
#63. But there's no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.
Lauren DeStefano
#64. If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.
Amiri Baraka
#65. My father established the first women's university in the kingdom, abolished slavery, and tried to establish a constitutional monarchy that separates the position of king from that of prime minister.
Basmah Bint Saud
#66. He slid his hands to the back of her neck, fumbling for the necklace's clasp. He undid it and held the chain of rubies up, red and gold in the flickering candlelight. "No shackles for us," he said, "no matter how rich.
Susanna Fraser
#67. Freedom's never been free, there's always been a price to be paid, but people have forgotten; they're handing their freedom, their lives, over like well behaved puppets on a string ... slavery is returning by choice.
L.M. Fields
#68. Gilbert darling, don't let's ever be afraid of things. It's such dreadful slavery. Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins! (Anne to Gilbert)
L.M. Montgomery
#69. While the morality of slavery alone might have eventually led to a showdown, it was America's sprawling growth that made the issue explosive.
Robert L. O'Connell
#70. 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
#71. No one can escape slavery; we are all slaves in some regards. We are slaves to our parent's expectations. We are slaves to the pressures of our peers. We are slaves to our own ideologies and faiths.
Mahima Martel
#72. The prosperity achieved through slavery had a way of blinding men's hearts to the evil of their own hands.
Ian Tregillis
#73. It's as if all identity has been stolen from them, except their identity as slaves.
Kevin Bales
#74. The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
Mark Twain
#75. The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called "the world's best hope" for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise.
Gordon S. Wood
#76. The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#77. You are not a woman. You may try-but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
George Eliot
#79. The fatal false step which, once taken, would thrust her down into the terrible slavery of appetite and hate and economics and government which our race knows so well.
C.S. Lewis
#80. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.
Margaret Atwood
#81. If he's - the inference is that somehow he thinks slavery is a - is a noble institution I would - I would strongly reject that assumption - that John Ashcroft is a openminded, inclusive person.
George W. Bush
#82. We have the potential to help people out of poverty, out of disease, out of slavery and out of conflict. Too often, we turn the other way because we think there's nothing we can do.
Alicia Keys
#83. Because it was Granny who had told Elsa about the Christmas tree dance in Miamas, and no one who's heard that story wants to have a spruce tree that someone has amputated and sold into slavery. In
Fredrik Backman
#84. 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
#85. Alliances with other nations lead to bondage," Zechariah explained. "Joseph started out as Pharaoh's trusted advisor in Egypt, but later generations ended up as slaves. And wasn't it Ahaz's so-called alliance with Assyria that led to our present slavery?
Lynn Austin
#86. It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#87. George, I know you're tired. But President Lincoln, he didn't free us to be lazy and no good. He freed us to work hard and improve ourselves.-George's Grandmother.
George Dawson
#88. I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father's concubine ... What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What's more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal.
Sylvia Fraser
#89. We've gone thorough religious wars and civil wars. America has gone through slavery, we've all gone through two world wars, segregation. Ultimately it's been a bloody, trying, wasteful, but eventually positive struggle.
Michael Scheuer
#90. It's therapy. [people] say true healing requires honest confrontation, and that can be seen on a macro scale with America and the things that have been swept under the rug, whether it be with the native Americans or slavery, or whatever holocaust that's happened on this soil.
Nate Parker
#91. IT'S ALL CLEAR
ISIS INVADES YOUR SPHERE
YET NO ONE IMAGINES YOUR FEAR
BUT DON'T WORRY
TAUSSI MELEK IS HERE
RESTORING LIVES NEAR
Widad Akreyi
#92. I like a woman who hasn't decided the kitchen's a place of slavery just because she works for a livin." "I feel absolutely the same way about a man,
Stephen King
#93. The first reason for people's slavery is our ignorance, and above all, our ignorance of ourselves.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#94. Wide-sounding Zeus takes away half a man's worth on the day when slavery comes upon him.
Homer
#95. I mean, let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back. I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.
Dave Zirin
#96. Most self-employed people remain slaves to the employed's working hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#97. 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
#98. Black people have slavery. And white people have our own thing-stuff we went though that hurt us that we have to cope with. Like when they took our slaves away. That was really hard for us. So it's pretty even.
Louis C.K.
#99. And there's no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.
Seneca.
#100. For the Afro-American in the 1920's being a 'New Negro' was being 'Modern'. And being an 'New Negro' meant, largely, not being an 'Old Negro', disassociating oneself from the symbols and legacy of slavery - being urbane, assertive militant.
Nathan Huggins
