Best 949 quotes in «slavery quotes» category

People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn't hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame.

Perhaps nowhere is our human mania for possessing, our delusion that the owned cannot have a soul of its own, more harmful to us. This disanimation justified all the horrors of the African slave trade. If the black man is so stupid that he can be enslaved, he cannot have the soul of a white man, he must be a mere animal.

Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial.

Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about "democracy.

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

Power is given only to those you allow to have power over you. No man was born with a master. The only master of all is the Creator, and he created all men to be free. Freedom is a God-given right, not a human-granted gift. No man should have to fight to breathe in good health and peace.

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.

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

Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery, another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy - and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy, turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then in 1877 for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it.

Resist any form of oppression.

Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.

see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you

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

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 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.

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

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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

society has an embarrassing history of denial

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.

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

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!

Slaves do not have the bravery of free men.

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.

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

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

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)

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

Slavery has not been abolished, it has been sanitized