Quotes About Slavery

The solution is simple: if we passed a law requiring United States farmers to hire only men with entry visas and work permits, there would be no problem. There is no such law. The farm lobby has made sure of that, for if there were no Mexicans to exploit, how would these barrel-assed slavers be able to harvest their crops?

Freedom has a high price, as high as that of slavery; the only difference is that you pay with pleasure and a smile, even when that smile is dimmed with tears.

He understood that, contrary to what most people think, total power means total slavery.

Everything we seek so enthusiastically before we reach adulthood— love, work, faith— turns into a burden too heavy to bear. There is only one way to escape this: love. To love is to transform slavery into freedom. But right now, I can't love. I just feel hate.

saw you, Sally Hemings is the name of it. It's in paperback for $3.25. She was Thomas Jefferson's slave and mistress for twenty-plus years. A really good book with real

I know that there is still a lot of bitterness and anger, and arguably justifiably so, when you think about how brutal slavery was and what its brutal legacy still is.

I don't think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion.

You can find justification for slavery in the Bible. Some say this is what the Bible says and that closes the argument.

Slavery discourages arts and manufacturing ...[and] every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery," said I, "still thou art a bitter draught.

las economías basadas en la represión del trabajo y los sistemas como la esclavitud y la servidumbre carecen claramente de innovación. Esto es así desde el mundo antiguo hasta la era moderna

While in England the profits of the slave trade helped to enrich those who opposed absolutism, in Africa they helped to create and strengthen absolutism. Farther

As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era.

The reason that the economic and political trajectory of the South never changed, even though slavery was abolished and black men were given the right to vote, was because blacks' political power and economic independence were tenuous. The southern planters lost the war, but would win the peace. They were still organized and they still owned the land.

The law, designed by the planters and for the planters, exempted one slaveholder from military service for every twenty slaves held. As hundreds of thousands of men died to preserve the southern plantation economy, many big slaveholders and their sons sat out the war on their porches and thus were able to ensure the persistence of the plantation economy.

Those who hate are doomed to become slaves to their hatred. It consumes them like a disease, but it is an illness they cannot–or do not want to–live without.

Death is the only mistress worth love because she owns us already. Loving one of your own is a form of slavery. Only by learning to love death can one taste freedom. By acknowledging the bonds of our mortality, we are freed to explore the loops that form the chains of life.

Hard, dangerous, unhealthy work was better performed by slaves than those who were free. Or who thought themselves so.

These anti-slavery Founders argued that if the South was going to count its "property" (that is, its slaves) in order to get more pro-slavery representation in Congress, then the North would count its "property" (that is, its sheep, cows, and horses) to get more anti-slavery representation in Congress. Of course, the South objected just as strongly to this proposal as the North had objected to counting slaves.

While Republicans were working to end slavery and secure civil rights, the new nation of southern Democrats was determined to head in an opposite direction.

few learn about the first slaves that arrived in the Massachusetts Colony set up by the Christian Pilgrims and Puritans. When that slave ship arrived in Massachusetts, the ship's officers were arrested and imprisoned and the kidnapped slaves were returned to Africa at the Colony's expense.

The Three-Fifths Clause had to do only with representation: it was an anti-slavery provision designed to limit the number of pro-slavery representatives in Congress.

James A. Garfield, America's 20th President, personally witnessed the final chapter in the deliverance of African Americans from slavery in America. He fought to abolish slavery as a Union General during the Civil War and afterwards as a Member of Congress, voted for the abolition of slavery and led in the passage of almost two dozen civil rights bills.