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Quotes About Enslavement

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.
~ Amanda Palmer
Technology is like the 666 because it controls us.
~ Demis Roussos
THE HOUSE SLAVE Those days I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat, and as the fields unfold to whiteness, and they spill like bees among the fat flowers, I weep. It is not yet daylight.
~ Rita Dove
A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Liberation, I guess, is everybody getting what they think they want, without knowing the whole truth. Or in other words, liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of. Here's to the eternal tandem.
~ Robert Fulghum
How could everything go so wrong so fast? For goodness' sake, she was only looking for a few plants. But instead, she'd found a whole village of mind-controlled slaves and a whole army of acrobatic kung fu vampires.
~ Kerrelyn Sparks
Many historians have concluded that one reason for the increasingly negative view of the Negro through the later eighteenth century was the need to salve the consciences of those who trafficked in and exploited enslaved men and women. As Grégoire put it, bleakly but bluntly, "People have slandered Negroes, first in order to get the right to enslave them, and then to justify themselves for having enslaved them. . . ."14
~ Kwame Anthony Appiah
wonderful power the Silver Shoes gave her. So the Wicked Witch laughed to herself, and thought, I can still make her my slave, for she does not know how
~ L. Frank Baum
How could they say that my religion, Islam was a 'race hate' religion after all the plunder and enslavement and domination of my people by white Christians in the name of white supremacy?
~ Muhammad Ali
To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.
~ Dejan Stojanovic
To be enslaved then, you needed to be ignorant. To be enslaved today, you need to be knowledgeable.
~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Finally, when he crowns it off by becoming a senator, then he becomes a slave in fine company, then he experiences the poshest and most prestigious form of enslavement.
~ Epictetus
Where are you going to find serenity and independence – in something free, or something enslaved?
~ Epictetus
The real tragedy of humankind,' Shealtiel used to say, 'is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold their heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.
~ Amos Oz
On the day of their arrival on Hazel Hill my family's history and fortunes—and my own heritage—were first indissolubly linked with the enslavement of human beings. There Dangerfield bought his first slaves and began building a hemp plantation, the foundation of the family's wealth and success. Just a few years later, in 1827, he died a prominent citizen and prosperous landowner, leaving his second wife Nancy and 11 growing children.
~ Andrew Himes
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
~ R. D. Laing
When you enslave a black man, you enslave yourself as well, for now you are bound to him as surely as he is bound to you, and your character is shaped by his bondage as surely as his own is. Make the black man servile, and in the same process you make yourself tyrannical. Make the black man quiver in fear before you, and you make yourself a monster of terror.
~ Robert Silverberg
Despair is a free man—hope is a slave.
~ L.M. Montgomery
Cattle... it called us cattle...We're hamburger, you mean.
~ Peter Clines, 14
Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty" to remain independent of the enslavement of the material world. "Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. This is our constant problem—how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent.
~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What we plead against is man's unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.
~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . . They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night. . . . As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.
~ Adam Hochschild
Gratitude is complicated. Feelings of dependence—and interdependence—can be both elusive and resisted, mostly because they are caught up with soul-crushing ideas of obligation and debt. But if gratitude is mutual reliance upon (instead of payback for) shared gifts, we awaken to a profound awareness of our interdependence. Dependence may enslave the soul, but interdependence frees us.
~ Diana Butler Bass
we—the proud people who started out to dominate nature—have become slaves of the very economic machine which we created in the process. We dominated nature, but our machine dominates us. We are perhaps more dominated by the artifacts we have created with our machines, than in many cultures people are dominated by nature which they have not learned to master.
~ Erich Fromm