Quotes About Slavery

In the late 1850s, one Florida senator reported that US ships sailing to Angola could buy Africans for about $70 and then sell them in Cuba for almost $1,200.

In addition to the above-referenced loans, I owe: The inalienable privilege of my race to the victims of the Middle Passage, a debt whose repayment has proven tricky to schedule, given the endless deferments, if not forbearances, and the way that the blood of slavery tends to run clear in the tears of liberals.

That Newton shuddered now [at slavery] is a testimony to they way a strong social movement can awaken a conscience..

slaveowners and their allies in the United States tried to protect their country from the most democratic, egalitarian, and terrifying prospect of the Age of Revolution: a generalized slave rebellion.

far as slaveowners in the Deep South were concerned, these arrangements inaugurated a golden age, which lasted twenty-five years. The white and black population steadily increased, cotton and sugar production expanded, and the remaining southern Indians were either expelled or brought under the jurisdiction of state laws.

Nationalism, racism, and other toxic prejudices likewise corrode our own global society. We live in a world in which slavery has not been eradicated and, if we are not vigilant, may again flourish under a new dispensation of global inequality.16

Nothing is ingrained more deeply in American ideology than that ours is a free country. Yet freedom and slavery were densely entangled in the early United States.

a society dependent on plantation slavery could not defend itself. "This Country is strong by Nature," the committee asserted, "but extremely weak from the nature of its population

known in the North as the "slave power." Slaveowners in the Deep South believed in the need for slavery and in their own benevolence as masters.

One assiduous historian has recently estimated that approximately 170,000 slaves were introduced into North America between 1783 and 1810, with more than 100,000 of these arriving in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Laws banning the importation and interstate transfer of slaves contributed to the evolution of proslavery doctrine by drawing a line between slave trading and slaveholding. That line originated as a useful fiction written by planters in the upper South during the revolutionary era.

We shall put an end to the age of our humiliation, to the blot of slavery and change the shame of every individual into pride at having participated in the greatest age of the German people, the age of the rise of the Germanic Reich of the German nation.

In the age of slaves, the freeman had still outnumbered them, and now, in the "age of freedom", for the first time liberty had fled from the majority. Genius, statecraft, the very power of leadership having become suspect in a world where the one essential criterion - mediocrity - gives us the comfortable assurance that no leader shall possess any qualities whatsoever above our own immediate comprehension, man has made sure that no man shall be free.

But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.

There is no freedom in peaceful slavery.

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.

But I do not admit the comparison between your slaves and even the lowest class of European free labourers, for the former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they enjoy in common with the brutes that perish.

Can you look forward to the future of our country and imagine any state of things in which, with slavery still existing, we should be assured of permanent peace? I cannot.

The first, and overarching, count in the new indictment is that slavery permitted one group of people to exercise unrestrained personal domination over another group of people.

Nevertheless, I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.

How came the people to err? How happens it that, when seeking liberty and equality, they fell back into privilege and slavery? Always through copying the ancient régime.

Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.