Quotes About Slavery

in the reign of the emperor Nero, when someone had the bright idea to make slaves wear uniforms, it was rejected on the grounds that this would make clear to the slave population just how numerous they were.

Just as the ambition of Roman slaves was usually to gain freedom for themselves, not to abolish slavery as an institution, so the ambitions of the poor were not radically to reconfigure the social order but to find a place for themselves nearer the top of the hierarchy of wealth.

some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.

At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They

By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth.

History isn't something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn't politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It's that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.

Ex-Confederate? What's that, like an ex-Nazi? The man fought for slavery! You don't get to put an 'ex-' in front of that!

The argument is that Black History Month dwells too much on the downside of white America's relationship to its brothers of African heritage, slavery and torture and the like, and ignores the work of all the good white folk through the years who were nice to black people (did you know it was a white teacher who first suggested George Washington Carver study horticulture?).

Everett found to his chagrin that questions that appeared minor gained incredible staying power and significance from even the most tenuous connection to slavery.

The moral he drew from the story of ancient slavery in 1836 was that Christianity's benevolent influence had almost imperceptibly and with the spirit of love abolished slavery.

A war to end slavery seems more compelling" to twenty-first-century Americans and far less abstract than a war for union.

He thus rejected union versus abolition as a false choice and adopted as his pseudonym the rather wordy but telling "A FRIEND OF THE UNION, AND AN ENEMY OF SLAVERY."34

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

With every form of slavery that has ended, new ones emerge that are more personal and sinister than the older forms.

As Margaret would later write, Europe had come to seem "my America," an unsettled territory where liberty was at hand, while the New World she had left behind had grown "stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war," the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.

James Shannon delivered the convention's opening address, which set the tone for the two-day event. His remarks were nothing if not unequivocal. Any threat to the biblically sanctioned right to hold slaves, Shannon assured his audience, "is just cause of war between the separate states." Those who advocated restrictions on slavery he denounced as "liars, yelping curs, assassins, knaves, Negro thieves and horse thieves."14 After

En el fondo todos somos esclavos de algo. Nadie escapa a la esclavitud. Tanto los de aquí adentro (en la carcel) como los de fuera. Y cuando la veía algo mustia: - No irás a decirme que tú cuando te creías libre no te sentías esclava de tu trabajo, de tus miedos, de tus pasiones e incluso de tus ganas de hacer las cosas con la mayor perfección. Pero Lucía no acertaba a comprenderla.

Los esclavos no dejan recuerdos, ¿sabéis por qué? Porque no tienen tumba. Un día de estos, nadie más tendrá tumba en Kulumani. Y nunca más habrá memoria de que aquí hubo gente... —Abuelo, vamos a casa... —Ahora ya no hace falta que nos metan en barcos. Santo Tomé está aquí, en Kulumani. Aquí vivimos todos juntos, esclavos y dueños de esclavos, los pobres y los dueños de la pobreza.

The transatlantic transport of all of these various Africans to the Americas qualifies as the quintessential moment of transfiguration, the height of human alienation and disorientation.

It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country

sold for the price of a slave. And in a matter of hours they hoped he would die like a slave; on a cross. Clearly Jesus would die as a slave, nailed to the cross beam, but he would not die like a slave.

In this world are many people who do not master their bodies. Such people say that no one can tell them what to do, not even God, and they think that in this way they have no master. In the end they become slaves to anything.

In 1968 King said the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were penned by men who owned slaves, thus, a "nation that got started like that . . . has a lot of repenting to do.