Quotes About Slavery

It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.

Vermont's history, at its roots, is multicultural from the members of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys with African heritage to the state's constitution, which was the first to prohibit slavery.

I felt wrapped in a fog of dull pain that hurt only enough to remind me that it, too, was without purpose, and there seemed no point to going through the empty motions of breakfast, the long slow drive to work, no reason at all beyond the slavery of habit. But

The war...must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks...unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination, we will have.

Upon reflection, Henry found it difficult to disagree with Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and frequent critic of the Lincoln administration, when he complained that the president had emancipated slaves where the Union could not free them and had kept them enslaved in places where the Union did enjoy the power to give them liberty.

To do the work of others is slavery. To do the work of God is true liberation.

I studied African American studies, and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring.

In the early 1800s, religion was often used as a way to keep slavery in place. Slaves were forced to attend the church of their owners, listen to selective dogma that kept them obedient and subservient.

I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she'd been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole.

The american dream wasn't meant for me, cause lady liberty's a hypocrite she lied to me, promised me freedom,education, and equality never gave me nothing but slavery but now look at how dangerous you made me callin me a mad man because im strong and bold.

David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), explored at length the paradox of slavery and freedom in human history, noting that John Locke and other advocates of liberty at times supported the institution of human bondage.38 Other historians have noted the extent to which the call for freedom often assumed the form of a rejection of servitude, even among slaveholders themselves.39

There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave. Their choice may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.

Hemos visto cómo los reyes negaron a Colón el derecho de vender a los indios como esclavos

The effects of the late civil strife have been to free the slave and make him a citizen. Yet he is not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it. This is wrong, and should be corrected.

THE CAUSE of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.

The line between the Rebel and Union element in Georgetown was so marked that it led to divisions even in the churches. There were churches in that part of Ohio where treason was preached regularly, and where, to secure membership, hostility to the government, to the war and to the liberation of the slaves, was far more essential than a belief in the authenticity or credibility of the Bible. There were men in Georgetown who filled all the requirements for membership in these churches.

The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.

Employment in the private sector company largely means slavery, poor salary, no job security, no appreciation, exploitation, harassment ,humiliation, eventually to be thrown out of the organization for no valid reason.

As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!

...Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.

Arabs invaded northern Africa in the seventh century, sending black African slaves to Asia and Arab countries. In the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, which is Arab, Berber Muslims hold possibly more than one hundred thousand black slaves.24 In Saudi Arabia, a common word for black is abd, meaning "slave.

The cowardly love we all have of freedom - which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange - is the irrefutable proof of how our slavery weighs upon us. Even I, who have just expressed my desire to have a hut or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of being myself, would I really dare to go off to this hut or cave, knowing and understanding that, since the monotony exists in me alone, I would never be free of it?

Indeed, to make tobacco in large enough quantities to satisfy the needs and the quotas from markets in England, the Virginia nobility—the true gentlemen farmers—became accustomed to building and maintaining their vast plantations by the utilization of great numbers of slaves, who cared not only for their masters' fields, but also for their bodies, their horses, their houses, and their children.

Slavery was in fact a legal punishment inflicted on those, for example, who could not pay their fines.