Slavery Quotes

Our minds become slaves to those we see as having total power to control us and to cause pain to us. We are quick to give up control of ourselves to those who have the power to rule us as long as they also have the power to feed us. This is the fundamental construct of a feudal society.

Among other possibilities, money was invented to make it possible for a foolish man to control wise men; a weak man, strong men; a child, old men; an ignorant man, knowledgeable men; and for a dwarf to control giants.

For all intents and purposes, the freedom America preaches is a hoax, it is fiction, just like their movies. People of colour in America are no where near free. They walk around without chains but they are everywhere in chains.

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.

No knowledge about self is self-slavery!

The problem with working, I mean not self-employed, is that you have to get up and routinely do something that you do not want to do, plus you get talked down to, ordered around by twats, you know you are better than. In reality, you are no better than a slave, no better than a hamster running on a wheel. You could say the hamster likes to run on the wheel, the hamster runs on the wheel by choice. But do not forget, the hamster is always in a cage, and will never be anything else, but a hamster running on a wheel inside a cage, unless it escapes the cage.

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

Writer Brigid Brophy exposes [their motives] with great precision:"Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. These slogans have a long history. After being used to justify slave traders, ruthless industrialists, and contractors who had found that the most economically 'realistic' method of cleaning a chimney was to force a small child to climb it, they have now been passed on, like an heirloom, to the factory farmers. 'We mustn't be sentimental' tries to persuade us that factory farming isn't, in fact, cruel. It implies that the whole problem had been invented by our sloppy imaginations.

Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?

Readers will be swept up by the drama and fast pace of this powerful debut novel.” Reading Today Online, International Reading Association

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

Ain't we all been hurt by slavery?

It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.

It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

The most prevalent form of slavery is being a slave of your own insecurities Or exploiting another's vulnerabilities. Lust, greed and anger are the pitfalls of the short sighted. Long term business is not possible through lust, greed, anger or guile; it is done based on 'sustainable' relationships; And that is possible when happiness is your goal and each individual you transact with, is a 'strong adult Individual'. We need to invest in ourselves to make us one and in others to help them become the same. It IS in my Selfish interest to have strong, adult individuals around!

It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics.

Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE...AND REMIND EVERYONE...OF THE FATE...OF THE ENSLAVED...YAZIDI WOMEN

Work or die’—this is the essence of slavery, of compulsion. And yet this is our world. Most of our world is enslaved but does not know it. Only the homeless are free, and for their freedom we sentence them to death. To refuse compulsion is to earn death, suffering, and calumny. It is not to refuse work—the homeless work very hard, endure many hardships we cannot imagine in our comfortable slavery. And yet we call our slavery freedom. We do not know what freedom means, yet.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

Thanks to his salary, an employee is free to eat whatever, wherever. However, because of his job, he is not free to eat whenever.

The greatest obstacle to liberty is not the existence of evil rulers, but the belief in the existence of good rulers.

Anarchy and Liberty are synonymous. Anything less is merely gradient levels of slavery.

There is no collective slavery revenge fantasy among black people, but I am certain, if there were one, it would not be about white people, not at all.

Many of the slaves believe such stories, and think it is not worth while to exchange slavery for such a hard kind of freedom. It is difficult to persuade such that freedom could make them useful men, and enable them to protect their wives and children. If those heathen in our Christian land had as much teaching as some Hindoos, they would think otherwise. They would know that liberty is more valuable than life. They would begin to understand their own capabilities, and exert themselves to become men and women.

I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay.

It is not the chains of some tyrant that robs us of freedom. Rather, it is the staleness of our attitude.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room -- room for the human mind.

The use of rape and enslavement as weapons of war MUST END!

From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her more, and many a time since have I kneeled down in the darkness of the night watch and kissed the deck of that ship because I knew her dear feet had trod it. She was never engaged to me. She treated me as fairly as ever a woman treated a man. I have no complaint to make. It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles.

If the Baron meets with a parcel of negro ships carrying whites into slavery to work upon their plantations in a cold climate, should we therefore imagine that he intends a reflection on the present traffic in human flesh? And that, if the negroes should do so, it would be simple justice, as retaliation is the law of God! If we were to think this a reflection on any present commercial or political matter, we should be tempted to imagine, perhaps, some political ideas conveyed in every page, in every sentence of the whole. Whether such things are or are not the intentions of the Baron the reader must judge.

I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.

It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives. He cannot withstand the influence of habit and associations that surround him. Taught from earliest childhood, by all that he sees and hears that the rod is for the slave's back, he will not be apt to change his opinions in maturer years.

Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.

IT’S ALL CLEARISIS INVADES YOUR SPHEREYET NO ONE IMAGINES YOUR FEARBUT DON'T WORRYTAUSSI MELEK IS HERERESTORING LIVES NEAR

America has a unique type of slavery that looks like freedom.

Where's the goddamn giant?

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.

She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny.

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own.

YAZIDIS AND CHRISTIANS WANT TO BE FREE OF NIGHT MIST AND BEHEADING DRIFT!

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt Tomey's Turl, old Carother McCaslin's son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds' great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859. . .But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn't stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and they never heard from or of him again at all––that is, that his white kindred ever knew. It was as though he had not only. . .put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother's betrayal and his father's nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man's humor of the moment.

Weekends are an employee’s parole.

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.

These are the woes of Slaves;They glare from the abyss;They cry, from unknown graves,"We are the Witnesses!

How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?

Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings--even at the cost of lowering their own chances--they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.

Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having the openness and exuberance of youth, while a tyrant counts this a danger, and seeks to slay or silence those possessed of spirit, while the discreet fear his power and violence.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Freedom is the inherent state of nature. A bird is free until you clip its wings and put it in a cage. Just because you pick up its shit, give it food and water, and let it do as it pleases within the confines of its cage does not make it any less a captive. Even if the cage was made of pure gold, the ornate bars would serve the same purpose.

If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift.We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be.We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.

Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart… To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty… and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have ad

We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?