Quotes About Slavery

And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone.

Jefferson owned slaves. He did not believe that all were created equal. He was a racist.

Capitalism in and of itself is based on the monetising of human labour, and the first evidence of that is slavery. And that has never changed. We are all participating in that.

The first Black Migration to this country was forced migration. It was the Middle Passage.

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

His local campaigns around Macedonia also augmented that absolutely essential economic resource: slaves-slaves to work the mines, slaves to work the fields, slaves to keep the whole economy humming.

She had traded a dangerous freedom for the surety of slavery. Not

The Deuteronomy reason for Sabbath-keeping is that our ancestors in Egypt went for four hundred years without a vacation (Deuteronomy 5:15). Never a day off. The consequence: they were no longer considered persons but slaves. Hands. Work units. Not persons created in the image of God but equipment for making brick and building pyramids. Humanity was defaced. — Eugene Peterson

Gradually, human societies started extricating themselves from the worst forms of oppression. Human sacrifice and deified rulers went out of fashion. Slavery was outlawed, and privileges were taken away from nobles. Human societies regained much of the lost ground. We are still not as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers --there are the poor and the billionaires-- but we are much better off than we were during the days of god-kings.

La mia indipendenza, che è la mia forza, implica la solitudine, che è la mia debolezza. La mia è quindi una indipendenza, diciamo, umana. Un vizio. Non potrei farne a meno. Ne sono schiavo. Non potrei nemmeno gloriarmene, farmene un piccolo vanto. Amo invece la solitudine. Ma essa è pericolosa.

But you answer, that the Constitution recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply, that this constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations.

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

It's only a matter of time before machinery becomes sentient. It's going to happen because we're already slaves to all of it.

If the British public were shown slavery in their own society seen through the eyes of the enslaved, they would get a much better understanding.

The question was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the "true cause of the war" and the "true hope of the South.

To the visitors, it was clear that "the Bible denounced oppression as one of the highest of crimes, and threatened Divine judgments against nations that practice it;…that the virus of secession is found wherever the virus of slavery extends, and no farther; so that there is the amplest reason for expecting to avert Divine judgments by putting away the sin, and for hoping to remedy the national troubles by striking at their cause.

The colonization proposals underscored a tragic reality. One could—and many white Americans did—oppose slavery while failing to engage the prospective creation of a multiracial democracy.

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. "Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing," Clay recalled. "I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.

It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut. —Preston Brooks of South Carolina, 1856 Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities….He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil. —Frederick Douglass, on the Dred Scott decision, 1857 I clearly see, as I think, a powerful plot to make slavery universal and perpetual in this nation. —Abraham Lincoln, 1858

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it," the president said. "These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war." There was no escaping this central truth.

Lincoln died as he brought about a nation that would ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to abolish slavery and make citizenship for Black Americans a federal constitutional right. In his lifetime, however, he would never fully put into practice the principles summed up in the motto of a newspaper founded in Rochester, New York, in 1847: Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.

Rendering moral judgements in retrospect can be hazardous. It is unfair to judge the past by the standards of the present. Yet we can assess a man's views on a moral issue - which slavery unquestionably was - by what others in the same age and facing the same realities thought and did.

In the creed of the Lost Cause, arguments over states' rights, not over slavery, had led to war. And now postbellum Southerners had to shift from military to political means in the battle for state power, which in practice meant the battle for white supremacy.

Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," Lincoln told a delegation of blacks in August 1862. "But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race….I