Best 949 quotes in «slavery quotes» category

Blue and Gray veterans led the way in focusing public attention on the minute details of each battle, a move that tended to distract attention from larger questions of meaning. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and thus pride in knowing where and when General Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not in knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia.

Born into a world, beautiful. Landing in a terra firma of mud. A mind, innocent. A mind, free. That innocence corrupted. A life, having not taken a thousand breaths, torn asunder by the hardened teeth guiding this nation. Stand? For what?

But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it... The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the Freeman had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.

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.

But who would build the roads if there were no government? You mean to tell me that 300 million people in this country and 7 billion people on the planet would just sit around in their houses and think “Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can't because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here then we could do it. If they were here to boss us around and steal our money and really inefficiently build the flat places, then we would be set. Then I would be comfortable and confident that I could get places. But I can’t go to Fred’s house or the market because we can’t possibly build a flat space from A to B. We can make these really small devices that enable us to contact people from all over the word that fits in our pockets; we can make machines that we drive around in, but no, we can’t possibly build a flat space.

Capitalizing a capital on our heads through the sweat of our brow. It's debt for nature exchange, read in between the nature of words and see what I'm trynna explain.

Career is just posh slavery.

C’est pour l’amour de la liberté qu’il devient « nègre » et se réduit en esclavage : pendant des années, son génie et son nom resteront invisibles dans les ténèbres de la sous-littérature

Could one forget how to be free?

Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.

Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.

Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated (196)

Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that he may bring out his sister, or mother, or wife.

Demons. And perhaps that was all the word 'demon' meant. Some creature torn from its own realm. Bound like a slave by a new master who cared nothing for its life, its well-being, who would simply use it like any other tool. Until made useless, whereupon it would be discarded.

Democracy is probably the only discovery by mankind which mostly brought it only happiness.

Dignity is the only one thing I have chosen over rules and benefits of slavery. I am not perfect because I chose to be myself; a human and this is the simplest form of dignity.

Did you know that even 50 years after all other countries had abolished slavery, the Netherlands refused to?

Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.

Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the thousands of years in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance. Thus Europeans enslaved other Europeans, just as Asians enslaved other Asians and Africans enslaved other Africans, while Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave" derived from the word for Slavs, who were enslaved by fellow Europeans for centuries before Africans began to be brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere. Africans were not singled out by a race for ownership by Europeans, they were resorted to after the rise of nation-states with armies and navies in other parts of the world which reduced the number of places that could be raided for slaves without great costs and risks. Slave-raiding continued in Africa, primarily by Africans enslaving other Africans and then, in West Africa, selling some of their slaves to whites to take to the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the growing range of ships and the growing wealth of nations eventually made economically feasible the transportation of vast numbers of slaves from one continent to another, creating racial differences between the enslaved and their owners as a dominant pattern in the Western Hemisphere. Such a pattern was by no means limited to Europeans owning non-Europeans, however. There were many examples of the reverse, quite aside from vast regions of the earth where neither the slaves nor their owners were either black or white.

Earned money brings you security, borrowed money gets you slavery.

Don’t be the slave of public opinion.

Don't look like you're going to cry all the time." She scowled. "Tears are one of their favourite drinks around here.

Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.

Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.

Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.

É impossível justificar os excessos do povo ao pegar em armas... Mas é realmente o povo a quem devemos imputar tudo, ou a seus opressores, que os mantiveram por tanto tempo na escravidão? Aquele que escolhe ser servido por escravos, e por escravos mal-tratados deve saber que preserva tanto sua propriedade quanto sua vida através da dominação, diferentemente de quem prefere os serviços de homens livres e bem tratados; e aquele que ceia ao som de lamentos de dor não deve, num momento de insurreição, reclamar que suas filhas foram violentadas e mortas, nem que cortaram a garganta de seus filhos. Quando tais males ocorrem, certamente são mais imputáveis à tirania dos grandes senhores do que à crueldade dos servos.

Employment is the biggest form of slavery

Employment is slavery. Workers merely have a choice over where to serve their daily eight-hour sentence.

Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.

Even after the war, Eugenia, do you still put people into categories the way you were taught to do—rich and poor, socially acceptable and not, black and white?” “I haven’t placed them there. Life has.” “But people are all the same in God’s eyes, don’t you think? Or do you believe there will be segregated divisions in heaven like the ones we’ve created here on earth?

Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

Especially appealing to the planter elite was the conservatism of the American Revolution. Indeed, according to their reading, it had been so conservative that it hardly deserved the title of revolution at all. The goal had been simple political independence, and the issue of home rule had not expanded to include the dangerous question of who should rule at home. The men who made the revolution had maintained control in victory.

Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country.

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.

Extend the sphere," Madison wrote, and, "you take in a greater variety of parties and interests," and you make it difficult for either a mob majority or a tyrannical minority to unite "to invade the rights of other citizens." Whatever one's take on any of the debates of the day (especially the debate over slavery), and whatever one's philosophical understanding of the relationship of republicanism to land, commerce, finance, and labor, most agreed on practicalities. Also wanted to remove Spain from the Mississippi; also wanted the capacities to pacify hostile native Americans and put down rebellions of poor people; and all wanted Great Britain to get out of the way of their commerce. All wanted "room enough," as Thomas Jefferson would put it in his 1800 inaugural address, to be protected from Europe's "exterminating havoc." Expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those two caused by expansion.

Faith for those few that are chosen even though many are called. Elohim meant it for everybody to enter but they dare not walk through the narrow difficulty, so they give into lifes delicacies that can't fulfill and leads to misery and slavery.

Faith offers freedom.

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.

For the African race, such as Providence has made it, and where He has placed it in America, slavery was the righteous, the best, yea, the only tolerable relation

For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.

Freedom is a delicate flower, like a pretty leaf in the air: It's hard to catch and may not be what you thought when you get it, she observed quietly.- Polly from Copper Sun

Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence! — fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful thralldom! — fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty! — fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has already done so much to save and bless! — fortunate for a large circle of friends and acquaintances, whose sympathy and affection he has strongly secured by the many sufferings he has endured, by his virtuous traits of character, by his ever-abiding remembrance of those who are in bonds, as being bound with them! — fortunate for the multitudes, in various parts of our republic, whose minds he has enlightened on the subject of slavery, and who have been melted to tears by his pathos, or roused to virtuous indignation by his stirring eloquence against the enslavers of men! — fortunate for himself, as it at once brought him into the field of public usefulness, "gave the world assurance of a MAN," quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the oppressed go free!

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.

Freedom is the decision to live and die, doing what you love.

Free yourself from mental slavery. Break those invisible chains your masters put on your spiritual neck to control you

Free is he who is reputable for not being fearful of losing his reputation.

Freedom is that you harness from being a slave to the one you love.

Freedom is the choice to be free than to be a slave.

From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.