Quotes About Enslavement

During the colonial years of our nation, racism was perpetrated in the form of two unspeakably horrible and devastatingly evil activities-the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.

People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.

I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my actions, movements, and thoughts. I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by everything I do.

It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

For many enslaved Africans, the Bible only became an avenue of resistance because it was one of the few books available to Black folks in a white, Christian-dominated society that prohibited Black literacy. Reading the Bible and applying its lessons of redemptive suffering, salvation, and struggle aided African Americans in their revolutionary fight against the "contradictions" of chattel slavery in a so-called democratic nation.

The exodus from the flood valley of the Nile, the end of foreign enslavement, was presented by the Bible writers as the condition of becoming fully Israelite.

She'd never thought of it as a colony. Instead it had been invaded, occupied, enslaved. She supposed colonized was more palatable to those who'd done it.

Who we are as African-Americans, as black folks in the diaspora, our cultural destiny, has been shaped by both the enslaved and the free.

Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.

She was trapped same as me, but she was trapped by her mind, by the minds of the people round her, not by the law. At the African church, Mr Vesey used to say, 'Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.' I tried to tell her that. I said, 'My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.

As Americans, we have marched a long way down the soul-destroying road of socialism, atheism, and totalitarianism. It is the price we pay when we turn away from God and turn to government to do everything for us. It is the formula by which nations become enslaved by their own leaders.

neither the church nor the state opposed the enslavement of blacks. Religious organizations such as the Benedictines even became large-scale slave owners.

for a people with a heritage of enslavement, evil is a concept of those who forged the shackles, not those who wore them.

Enslavement could not have existed and certainly could not have persisted without medical science. However, physicians were also dependent upon slavery, both for economic security and for the enslaved "clinical material" that fed the American medical research and medical training that bolstered physicians' professional advancement.

If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more.

Learning about our history and diving deep in Enslaved, opened my eyes to a new way of thinking. Playing my character really inspired me – he was an author who had a role in the abolition of slavery and even signed the document.

Soon after he purchased me, Epps asked me if I could write and read, and on being informed that I had received some instruction in those branches of education, he assured me, with emphasis, if he ever caught me with a book, or with pen and ink, he would give me a hundred lashes.

To ask the master for a knife, or skillet, or any small convenience of the kind, would be answered with a kick, or laughed at as a joke. Whatever necessary article of this nature is found in a cabin has been purchased with Sunday money.

The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience.

See, that's what we're like. You're brave and you're not afraid to die, but you're afraid of being late for work. That's how enslaved we are, that's how ingrained it is.