Quotes About Slavery

Recall that the 1789 law prohibited slavery in a federal territory. In 1820, the Democratic Congress passed the Missouri Compromise 40 and reversed that earlier policy, permitting slavery in almost half of the federal territories. Several States were subsequently admitted as slave States; and for the first time since the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, slavery was being officially promoted by congressional policy.

Several other pro-slavery laws were also passed by Democrats in Congress, including the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. 42 That law required Northerners to return escaped slaves back into slavery or else pay huge fines.

Both animal and human slaves could be controlled best if kept economically and psychically dependent on their owners.

Pasamos por el mundo profanándolo todo hora tras hora y siempre soñando con un mundo mejor, más lleno de tributos y de esclavos. No entendemos la casa que nos dieron, creemos que vinimos a mandar, ejecutores de una ley tan ciega como nosotros mismos

And so you see, dear reader, the death of my friend Sophie forced me to realize that the whole universe is one big concentration camp run by God -- the biggest Nazi of them all! So slavery in Virginia wasn't all that bad. And it was really God's fault anyway. Pretty good tragic insight there. Think I'll crank some Bellamy Brothers and get loaded!

What occurred had to do with Will—Sam's fellow slave at Nathaniel Francis's. While submitting to one of his owner's periodical beatings, Will had finally snapped, perpetrating what for a Negro was the gravest of deeds: he had struck Francis back. Not only that, he had struck Francis savagely enough (with a lightwood fagot wrenched from a barnyard stack) as to have broken Francis's left arm and shoulder. Then Will lit out for the woods, and had yet to be found.

Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can. I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the source of all our misery, individual, political, and economic.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Dime cuantas mentiras cuentas y te diré que tan esclavo eres.

And given that my proposal were carried into effect, the only novelty in it is that, just as the individual in acquiring the ownership of a gang of slaves finds himself at once provided with a permanent source of income, so the state, in like fashion, should possess herself of a body of public slaves, to the number, say, of three for every Athenian citizen.

Flick beat all but one of the slave labor and plunder charges, because three prominent U.S. judges concluded that the director and owner of a corporation should not be held accountable for slavery and looting by his companies, unless the prosecution could prove that he personally ordered each particular crime to be carried out.

The exodus was not a movement from slavery to freedom, but from slavery to covenant. Redemption was for relationship with the redeemer, to serve his interests and his purposes in the world.

Please keep abusing each other over differences of skin tone and absurdly tiny religious discrepancies. It's good for the country. Racism needs to rise in periods where slavery makes a comeback, because if all you simian-browed, atavistic gutter-plebes started cooperating, all of a sudden, you'd barbecue our prissy fannies in a hot ghetto second. Vent

More than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery.

The slaves of developed industrial Civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labour but by the status of being mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.

These changes occurred just as the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean islands and the Portuguese settlement of the Brazilian subcontinent was getting under way and thus opened the American market for African slaves. The decimation of the native Arawak and Carib peoples in the Caribbean islands, the first major zone of European settlement, especially encouraged the early experimentation with African slave labor.

Until the 1830s more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic annually and as late as 1750 some 4.5 million of the estimated 6.6 million people who had come to the Americas since 1492 were African slaves.

All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?

Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America.

Toni's greatness as a novelist had a lot to do with her skill—her great ability—to show how we mucked up the landscape, not just in the world, but in ourselves. Slavery was one way we mucked it up, of course, and the enormous wound at the center of "Beloved" (1988) has to do with how slavery not only killed bodies, but made a mess of our minds, thus creating a particularly American way of thinking.

Wide-sounding Zeus takes away half a man's worth on the day when slavery comes upon him.

You say [slavery] is wrong; but don't you constantly object to anybody else saying so? Do you not constantly argue that this is not the right place to oppose it? You say it must not be opposed in the free States, because slavery is not there; it must not be opposed in the slave States, because it is there; it must not be opposed in politics, because that will make a fuss; it must not be opposed in the pulpit, because it is not religion. Then where is the place to oppose it?

I do not believe it is a constitutional right to hold slaves in a Territory of the United States. I believe the decision was improperly made, and I go for reversing it.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature -- opposition to it, in his love of justice.