Quotes About Slavery

To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.

He aquí cómo el lujo, la disolución y la esclavitud han sido en todo tiempo el castigo a los esfuerzos orgullosos que hemos hecho para salir de la feliz ignorancia donde nos había situado la sabiduría eterna. El

sólo hay esclavos por naturaleza, porque los ha habido contrariando sus leyes. La fuerza ha hecho los primeros esclavos, su cobardía los ha perpetuado.

No hay derecho a matar al enemigo sino en el caso de no poderle hacer esclavo. Luego, el derecho de hacerle esclavo no viene del derecho de matarle. Por lo tanto, es un cambio inicuo hacerle comprar a costa de su libertad una vida sobre la cual nadie tiene derecho.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.

Unless this love is among us, we can kill ourselves with work and it will only be work, not love. Work without love is slavery.

I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave, and you don't have to think for yourself, or you're a master, and you don't have to work for yourself.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

I believe that modern slavery is the most outrageous assault on the rights of an individual. It is something that touches me deeply because I grew up in rural Brazil and could see first-hand how poverty forced people to work in harsh, exploitative conditions.

The Roman people too, in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace. Rather bread and circuses than endless internecine wars. As the Romans themselves recognized, their freedom had contained the seeds of its own ruin, a reflection sufficient to inspire much gloomy moralizing under the rule of a Nero or a Domitian.

Aristotle believed democracy could exist only because of slavery, which gave citizens the leisure for higher pursuits. (Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)

Even as the armies of slaves were underfed and dying from hunger, some were forced to wear bizarre tin-plate masks, in hundred-degree heat, to keep them from gaining the slightest nourishment from chewing the cane. The

Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)

French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects.

The Jews were slaves in the land of their Exile, and suddenly they found themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only exists in a land like Turkey. This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination toward repressive tyranny, as always happens when a slave rules.

The growth of literacy was sparking an awakening – welcome to some, dreadful to others – across the slave-empire of Jamaica. Reading seemed to ignite a hidden store of fuel within an enslaved person.

No correlation exists between sugar and nutritional benefit. Its presence in food assures the tongue that energy and protein reside within, but sweet foods deliver a benign-tasting venom. A crowning irony of the sugar-slave symbiosis was that it was not fatal just to Africans; it could also be fatal to their masters.

The slaves themselves were powerless to create any written record of what they witnessed, or to publicize it in any way beyond the discreet oral circles of plantation life. What can be known of Sharpe's method and motives must be seen through the lens of the Jamaican prosecutorial narrative, which sought to understand him only to the point of gathering sufficient evidence to justify his hanging.

Sharpe's] only goal had been to make people free, he said, and what had been a peaceful movement had spun out of control. But he remained defiant to the end about the idealism of his cause, if not the means. 'I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery!' he said. Belby reported that Sharpe's frame expanded, his spine stiffened, and his eyes seemed to 'shoot forth rays of light' when he said this.

If Samuel Sharpe had been trying to seize the attention of the mother country – just as Nat Turner had given the American South a brief window through which to reconsider slavery – he succeeded far beyond what he might have hoped. Never before had enslaved people spoken so loudly in Britain.

The revolt Samuel Sharpe had started on a Caribbean island was building to a culmination at Westminster – a final drive to asphyxiate slavery throughout the British Empire. But it came not through a spectacular legislative duel or an inspiring floor speech, but rather through the grind of parliamentary process and the unromantic reality of dickering in the shadows.

It was the perfect set. Theseus gave a great war cry and brought his sword arcing up toward Sheba's throat - but the monster of the labyrinth lives inside us all. She is the dark, devouring hunger that is never sated, the creeping shadow that ever plays the fiend to our seraphim, the secret rage hidden in our hearts; deny her, and we become her slaves; fight her, and we make her invincible. By now, you must know that no monster can ever be killed, not really - […]

When I was in a Guineaman, between the wars, there was a certain sorts of blacks called Whydaws, or Whydoos, that used to die by the dozen in the Middle Passage, out of mere despair at being taken away from their country and their friends. We used to save a good many by touching them up with a horse-whip in the mornings.

The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.