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Quotes About Slavery

Family separations were probably the most brutal, heartless aspect of American slavery, although many slaveholders claimed that blacks, being less than fully human, weren't particularly bothered by it.
~ Richard Grant
They might also ask us by what reasoning we have concluded that we can have it both ways, that in one breath we can say that those remote and lofty thinkers have not answered our questions as to the good, and, in another, we can boast that we have indeed become a better species, having virtuously given up such nasty habits as slavery and dueling and cannibalism.
~ Richard Mitchell
If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.
~ Richard Wright
The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days.
~ Kate Chopin
Tears and complaints - the means which I have called water power - can be an extremely useful weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing other to a condition of slavery.
~ Alfred Adler
When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor [with which] it is now favoring feudalism and slavery.
~ August Bebel
This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.
~ Euripides
A strong belief in fate is the worst kind of slavery; on the other hand, there is a comfort in the thought that God will be moved by our prayers.
~ Epicurus
I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.
~ William Pitt (Earl of Chatham)
Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing States, yet no part of our slave-holding country, is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants, than St. Louis. It
~ William Wells Brown
He was a regular Yankee from New England. The Yankees are noted for making the most cruel overseers.
~ William Wells Brown
A few weeks after, on our downward passage, the boat took on board, at Hannibal, a drove of slaves, bound for the New Orleans market. They numbered from fifty to sixty, consisting of men and women from eighteen to forty years of age. A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound for the cotton or sugar regions, is an occurrence so common, that no one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank their chains at every step. There
~ William Wells Brown
But, sad to say, Jefferson is not the only American statesman who has spoken high-sounding words in favour of freedom, and then left his own children to die slaves.
~ William Wells Brown
WITH the growing population of slaves in the Southern States of America, there is a fearful increase of half whites, most of whose fathers are slaveowners and their mothers slaves.
~ William Wells Brown
How can you measure the value of the good news of Christ? It is spoken of in the Bible as light in the darkness, freedom from slavery and life from death. Look at how much the Early Church valued the message. They received it with great joy and overflowing gratitude.
~ William Wilberforce
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests" (Luke 2:14). How can you measure the value of the good news of Christ? It is spoken of in the Bible as light in the darkness, freedom from slavery and life from death.
~ William Wilberforce
The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well, and fed him well, and even gave him a little education -- a little education; gave him a long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him. Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used in those days is used today, by the same white man.
~ x malcolm
There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn't get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call 'em "chitt'lin'" nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That's what you were -- a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters.
~ x malcolm iv
Romani slaves were in demand because of their skilled crafts and their importance to the economic market. With the growing dependency of landowners, monasteries and the Crown on Romani slaves, the Romanian term Tigan came to be used synonymously with 'slave' and it still has a derogatory connotation in the Romanian language today.
~ Yaron Matras
A decree prohibiting the separation of Romani families through the sale of slaves was adopted in Wallachia in 1850. The ownership of private slaves finally became illegal in Moldavia in 1855 and in Wallachia in 1856.
~ Yaron Matras
Taken at its face value, the Bible does not condemn slavery. When abolitionists argued that the deeper message of the Bible was clearly against slavery—as Mark Noll points out—they were viewed as suspiciously unfaithful to the Bible.
~ David P. Gushee
Every generation has its hottest of all hot-button issues, the issue that becomes the litmus test of everyone's orthodoxy and provokes conflicts sometimes leading to schism. In earlier generations it was slavery, or segregation, or apartheid, or Nazism, or abortion, or temperance, or Sabbath or tongue-speaking
~ David P. Gushee
Slavery makes other people do the hard work. It is no accident that slave labor has historically been associated with tropical and semitropical climes.* The same holds for division of labor by gender: in warm lands particularly, the women toil in the fields and tend to housework, while the men specialize in warfare and hunting; or in modern society, in coffee, cards, and motor vehicles. The aim is to shift the work and pain to those not able to say no.
~ David S. Landes
Grant oversaw some enslaved people his wife had inherited. He disliked abolitionism, but he realized that slavery threatened to destroy the Union, which he wanted to save. Once he was in place as an officer in the Northern army, he devoted his energy to preserving the nation. Part of that devotion included an openness to using African American troops.
~ David S. Reynolds