Quotes About Slavery

His father wasn't the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw." "No it isn't," I said. "That book wasn't even written until a century after slavery was abolished." "Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?

The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

Patrols. Groups of young whites who ostensibly maintained order among the slaves. Patrols. Forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.

That's an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery.

Haven't you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children.

In an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: "I couldn't really let her come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole.

Is that the way it's going to be, I wonder? Is that the future: Large numbers of people stuck in either President-elect Donner's version of slavery or Richard Moss's.

Turn a few pages and you'll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That's history. It happened whether it offends you or not.

Were all slaves so thin—underfed, overworked, and taught that most things hurt?

Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only

Jail for Bankole could have meant being sold into a period of hard, unpaid labor—slavery. Perhaps if he had been younger, the deputies might have taken his money and arrested him anyway on some trumped-up charge. I had begged him not to go, not to trust any police or government official. It seemed to me such people were no better than gangs with their robbing and slaving.

First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the days of slavery?

When we have had some of these slaves on board my master's vessels to carry them to other islands, or to America, I have known our mates to commit these acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but of men. I have even known them gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations some of them practised to such scandalous excess, that one of our captains discharged the mate and others on that account.

Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. ST. AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created.

The first thing I must be willing to admit when I begin to examine what controls and dominates me is that I am the one responsible for having yielded myself to whatever it may be. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because somewhere in the past I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because at some point in my life I yielded myself to Him.

The criminal (as slave) often seeks a person of great perfection (and here, as a judge of people's imperfection, the criminal is much harsher than a good man), because he so wants to obtain trust from outside (not through an inner change of mind). If he believes he has found such a person, he gives himself up to him in the most complete slavery, and he searches in an importunate manner for people whom he could serve as a slave. He also wants to live as a slave so as never to be alone.

Perhaps that was what the war was really about. Twas an entire nation of runaways, America in 1861, and your place in society depended on what you had run from and when. Perhaps General McClellan was right that the war was not really about slavery. Perhaps it was a struggle between the dreams of men who would run no more.

freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.