Best 949 quotes in «slavery quotes» category

[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.

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

She had been nothing but a beloved bauble passed from a mother to a son, a decoration of vanity, devoid of identity.

She has spent the night hidden in the left corner of the room, watching this man she’s been told is her husband become the animal he’s been told that he is.

She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it.

SHOW THE WORLD YOUR STRONG COMPASSION! GIVE YOUR VOICE TO VOICELESS KOBANE KIDS!

SHOW THE WORLD YOUR STRONG COMPASSION: GIVE YOUR VOICE TO VOICELESS YAZIDI GIRLS!

Since moving to the Castle, she'd discovered that only the white men talked of "black magic." As though magic had a color.

Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.

Slavery has not been abolished, it has been sanitized

Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else.

Slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct.

Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic.

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 adopted. [For the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1789]

Slavery never ended it just evolved.

Slavery all day, and then, suddenly, by nightfall- freedom!

Slavery and indecisiveness are characteristics of most Christians of the world

Slavery happened. That flag stands for segregation. We have monuments to Civil War generals and slave owners, as well as preserved plantations. But we have only one slavery museum, and that was built by a private citizen. We have no national or federal slavery museum. There is no government-funded slavery museum. A proposal to put one in Virginia came through in 2001 and went unfunded and failed. Another one in Richmond reached a similar fate. This is absolutely shameful.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

Slavery is stupid

Slavery stands as an affront to human dignity.

Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.

Slavery of the heart, oh Love - a prisoner of will thou art - proof that love, while blissful, can oft also be Hell. Demonstrative definition thou art, that love can be strategic as well!

Slavery remains rife, the shackles are just different. Labels and desires have replaced the cuffs and chains.

Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in many other situations), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom—a fight possible under tyranny, and even under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were "born" free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society—more than the abstract nakedness of beig human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.

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.

Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases.

Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness. A shoemaker on the South Carolina Sea Islands expressed in his own way: "I'se lost an arm, but it hasn't gone out of my brains.

Slaves do not have the bravery of free men.

So by slow degrees the Britons were seduced by pleasant pastimes... until finally the gullible natives came to call their slavery "culture".

Slaves in the past were captured by force; today’s slaves surrender themselves. The masters are the same old folk (who are now more civilized) who would not lift a hand against a fellow human being! They have established economic systems that perpetuate their superiority so the poor are blamed either for their laziness or their fate.

society has an embarrassing history of denial

Something in the water near to him caught his interest, he followed and thought it to be wooden debris, but as soon as he turned his attention elsewhere, the severed head surfaced facing his former direction. (Hope River Story)

Solitude. Ensomhed. Hvorfor hed det sådan? Da jeg så huset igen, tænkte jeg at forklaringen måske er ganske enkel. Solitude ligger ensomt på en bjergtop næsten så højt man kan komme, og har udsigt over havet til tre sider. Der er ingen naboer, kun skov, og skoven trænger sig på; træerne er begyndt at brede sig ind på den store gårdsplads mellem hovedbygningen, et smukt hus i to stokværk, og et fundament til en anden bygning, som ikke findes længere. Den er rimeligvis blæst bort i en orkan. En anden bygning tæt på selve huset er mere solid og rummer pulte som en skolestue, ja, det er en skolestue eller har været det engang. Døren mangler, og gulvet er dækket afløv og efterladenskaber fra dyr der har søgt ly derinde. Selve huset virker misligholdt, men ikke forfaldent.

Some of today’s slaves sleep on king size beds.

Some animals would be offended if they were treated like some people.

Some things are not worth dying for, but without them life is not worth living.

...So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!

Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.

So that originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery. Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his brethren, then they were to him: and they no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him. [Genesis 37].

So, your friends call you Bastian. Your enemies call you asshole. What do lovers call you?” “Why do you want to know?” She smiled up at the stars. “Future reference.

Sometimes you got to lie on the outside to keep your voice loud on the inside. We don’t owe the master the truth. He owes us. Nothing comes from the master. He is the thief in the night. He steals it all. And every time we have to say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir,’ he steals some more. But we can survive it, if we stay loud in here,” she said, throwing a fist hard against her breast.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

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

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.

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.

Summer turns and marches away, fed up with being handled like a child. Like she’s a glass doll that might break at any minute. She hasn’t been a child since the day she was whipped into muteness. Anxiety might strangle her sometimes, but she’s not some baby needing to be coddled.

Ten years ago, I attended a community meeting for an oil pipeline proposal PE was ramming through the environmental impact process in eastern Washington. I sat in the front row as you defended PE’s plan to destroy an important Traditional Cultural Property to build a pipeline that would bisect the state from the Canadian border to the Columbia River. You had no respect for the sovereignty of tribes over the land. Your plan lacked even basic environmental protection for air and water, but you defended it because you didn’t give a fuck about air Indians breathe or water Indians drink.

That a man might do something very audacious and desperate for money, power or fame, was to the general apprehension quite possible; but, in face of plainly-written law, in face of constitutional guarantees protecting each state against domestic violence, in face of a nation of forty million of people, that nineteen men could invade a great State to liberate a despised and hated race, was to the average intellect and conscience, too monstrous for belief.

That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate.