Quotes About Slavery

Henry Louis Gates's edited The Classic Slave Narratives, which include Jacobs's as well as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, continue to be so important to me.

It is but a step from companionship to slavery when one associates with vice.

Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

The new Republican party thought that it did, and in its 1856 platform denounced slavery and polygamy together as 'twin relics of barbarism'. Or

Once men inure themselves against the obvious injustices of slavery and defend its use for the economic advantages they believe it brings, humanity deserts them

Those who set out nobly to be their brother's keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.

You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

Q: Why write about slavery? Haven't we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one? A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there's a lot of competition.

James Connolly, 1916: 'The worker is the slave of capitalist society: the female worker is the slave of that slave.

After 1619—when Great Britain entered into the slave trade—some ten million African slaves were shipped to North America and South America, all the way down to Brazil. "In Virginia, during the 1680s, there were still only 3,000 slaves in a population of 70,000, but by 1756 they numbered over 100,000, about 40 percent of the population," wrote historian James Ferguson.

Europeans usually did not have to capture their own African slaves; African rulers and slave merchants were willing to do it. During the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 12 to 25 million enslaved people were shipped from Africa for the Americas, of whom some 85 percent survived the terrible six-to-ten-week voyage. About 40 percent went to Brazil, 40 percent to the Caribbean, 5 percent to what would become the United States, and the balance to the rest of Spanish America.

During the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, Muslim slave traders took an estimated 2.1 million enslaved Africans from the east coast to Arabian and Indian ports. Overall, the Muslim slave trade lasted twelve centuries and shipped approximately 14 to 15 million people. Possibly as many people were enslaved within Africa as were shipped west and east.

Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.

The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.

It is difficult to say today whether the Battle of Kosovo was a defeat or a victory for the Serbian people, whether thanks to it we fell into slavery or we survived in this slavery.

I support engagement, diplomacy, and trade with Cuba, China, Vietnam, and many countries with less than stellar human rights records, because I believe that once enslaved people taste freedom and see the products of capitalism, they will become hungry for freedom themselves.

There are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today — that's double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.

I am transported to the time before the War between the States, a time that is bred into our awareness as Southerners, yet most often lauded as a day of grace and grandeur. Mr. Bass Carter causes me to wonder . . . how different is that history when seen from the fields and the lowly slave cabins?

Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't.

When I hear the ignorant things people say about the war, about it all being over slavery, I want to shout that it isn't. It isn't that at all. Remember

Can't just tell a soul it is free, Tavar. Freedom must be done for oneself. Important that the slaves created their own freedom.

As Thomas Jefferson once noted, "Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery." Another