Quotes About Slavery

I went to Zanzibar on holiday and there was a lot there about civil rights and there was a museum, where there are old slave chambers. It was horrible to go to and they've still got the chains there. It opens your eyes a lot.

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.  Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.  Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. 

La obstinación de fray De las Casas para liberar a los indígenas de la cruel dominación de los europeos lo llevó a propugnar su reemplazo por esclavos traídos de África, como si estos no fueran seres humanos, lo que fomentará el tráfico negrero al darle sustento ideológico y religioso.

The adhesive force by which all three bodies are held together is desire. The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery.

The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all of man's slavery.

Would you really have married the man who'd killed your brothers? Well, first of all, I wouldn't have been given a choice. But yes, probably. Yes. I was a slave, and a slave will do anything, anything at all, to stop being a thing and become a person again. I just don't know how you could do that. Well, no, of course you don't. You've never been a slave.

I do not think I was a hothead—not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.

Slavery was so brutal and devastating, Europeans looked for ways to justify themselves. For a while they used the argument that the Africans were pagans, savages, heathens in need of salvation.

Here is one of the most surprising facts about the Civil War: Lee believed that slavery was wrong, and had freed his own negroes long before the conflict came; but Grant's wife owned slaves at the very time that her husband was leading the armies of the North to destroy slavery.

We are to free the slaves because we were once slaves. Sabbath is a remembrance of the stale bondage of Egypt and the fresh air of our new garden given to us because of the faithfulness of God's covenantal love, not due to our capacity to make God happy. Yet God is more than happy with us — he adores us and lavishes us with freedom and joy.

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

For if there was any kindness in slavery it was dependent on the docility of the slaves; any slave who was unwilling to be a slave broke through the myth of paternalism and benevolence, and brought down on himself the violence inherent in the system. A

The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient. Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master's philosophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he, Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it.

The story of the bondage in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape - or emigration - to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East.

Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none.V

Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the menial work.

struck him as a favorable contrast with his own nation that there was no slavery in India;II and that though the population was divided into castes according to occupations, it accepted these divisions as natural and tolerable

dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable

When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master's philosophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he, Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it.

Some find the institution of marriage to be a form of tyranny not unlike slavery. Most of us at the Charity Organization Society feel that way. We do not need a man to become whole individuals. We are scholars and freethinkers, Mr. Llewelyn. We refuse to be put on a pedestal but instead hope to help bring about social change.

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.